Just another morning spent cleaning up the garbage


There’s a whole ugly underbelly to the blog — the software intercepts comments from banned individuals, or ones containing banned words, and a few innocent comments that it has a spasm over, and shuffles them off into spam and trash folders automatically. It’s a sewer down there, and I have to dive in now and then to salvage mistakes and rescue them. I avoid it for as long as I can because it’s not pleasant, and mostly I have to just skim a few hundred hidden comments, say “Yep, that’s shit”, and hit flush.

But today I found a few comments that were pretty vile and deserve to be exposed to the light of day before being destroyed. These are from Bovarchist, a troll from the slymepit, and it turns out he’s a racist COVID-19 denier who supports Trump.

Let’s bury it below the fold, OK?

This guy has been cruising by the blog regularly for maybe a decade, obsessively dropping abusive comments that get instantly whisked away into the sewer because he was banned so long ago, for good reason, obviously. His persistence is impressively stupid. I post it here now so you can all see the kind of stuff that would poison conversations here if there weren’t a blacklist.

I didn’t hide his email because, seriously, fuck that guy. Fuck. That. Guy.

Comments

  1. davidc1 says

    Is that why some of my comments don’t show up , was thinking i was on the naughty step over here ,as well at The Guardian .
    They are premodifing my comments .Just because in a article about the former Times editor Harold Evans .
    I asked if he was the one that used to bonk Arianna Huffington .Also i said something about him getting duffed up by someone on a TV programme because he criticized the mans wife.

  2. blf says

    Thank you poopyhead ;-) for encouraging a lively, sometimes testy, environment for the commentators… And, of course, for the frequently fascinating posts!

    The mildly deranged penguin complains there isn’t enough cheese or MUSHROOMS!, the spider who lives behind my monitor complains there is too much cheese and MUSHROOMS!, the extreme angry mouse (still occupying the Tardis in the cabinet of curiosities) just complains, and I’m trying to work out if these complaints are about the blog / posts / commentators, or the lair, or the planet Mars, or the recent rain of small furry pineapple-shaped bats from Alpha Centauri.

  3. says

    There is a filter in place that automatically blocks certain words, especially certain racist & gender slurs. Happens a lot.

    We ate all the mushrooms for dinner last night.

  4. birgerjohansson says

    The late Ed Brayton would have a recurring headline “Mikey gets mail” showing emails sent to Michael Weinstein an activist working against religious discrimination in the military.
    The letters were usually both vile and entertaining, about half of them would have anti-semitic slurs.

  5. PaulBC says

    Well, his top comment is revealing, because I suspect that he’s given the most honest and concise explanation out there for the hostility towards BLM. There are many ways of beating around the bush, but there are a lot of Americans who just “know” what the “real problem” is. Few are as forthright about their bigotry though.

  6. stroppy says

    “Bovarchist” eh?

    From Merriam-Webster

    bovarism
    : a conception of oneself as other than one is to the extent that one’s general behavior is conditioned or dominated by the conception
    especially : domination by such an idealized, glamorized, glorified, or otherwise unreal conception of oneself that it results in dramatic personal conflict (as in tragedy), in markedly unusual behavior (as in paranoia), or in great achievement

    Hmm, I’d say just another juvenile delinquent festering with age. Certainly no great achievement, they are everywhere these days.

  7. whheydt says

    You have my sympathy for having the clean out the sewer periodically.

    On another forum, where I comment quite a bit, there are multiple moderators and all first posts go to moderation to help weed out spam. One trick the spammers try is to make an innocuous first post and after that they either edit the post to be spam, or just post spam. One way that some make a first post is to copy-paste an existing post. I was reading a thread there this morning and immediately recognized where a first post had come from…because it was one I’d made yesterday.

  8. says

    I actually found that last post interesting.It indicates that he hates the rich but love Trump. Partly for being rich. Somehow.
    Fascinating, Captain.

  9. Kagehi says

    @davidc1 “What are these words of which you speak ?”

    Youtube here. Sorry, but we can’t tell you want you did wrong, even if it was totally innocent, otherwise you might avoid breaking the rules, by not breaking the rules <- Real response one poster received while trying to work out why the F they got a video blocked. lol

  10. says

    He’s been practicing my name for over a decade, so even dumbasses like bovarchist can eventually figure it out. Pound out a thousand spam/slurs with my name in them, you’ll learn it.

    Huh…clearly, all the people misspelling my name have not obsessed over me sufficiently.

  11. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    Damn, Mrdead Inmypocket beat me to it. Was about to post here too about the miracle of a hater spelling your name correctly.

  12. davidc1 says

    @14 HAHA ,i have received one warning from faceache for calling someone A Poor Deluded Moronic Cretin ,didn’t meet their high standards .
    Talking of faceache ,i was a late joiner ,and then only sites that dealt with my hobbies .
    Now i am in sites like Bigots Are us ,English and Proud ,mainly for making the piss out of RWNJ’s .

  13. bowdsquared says

    Damn, I thought the Slymepit had died out over time? How long has it been, a decade?

    As you said: Fuck. That. Guy.