Next to each comment author's name are two links: Ignore Author, and Read More.

Ignore Author helps you ignore the posts from an author. Click on that link, and from that point on, you won't see that author's posts. (You need to refresh the page for it to take effect.) It functions at the individual level. Try it, and it should make sense.

The Ignore Author feature isn't censorship. By ignoring an author, you're the only person not seeing his/her posts. Other users will still see the post.

Read More helps you search for posts from the author. This is useful if you like a writer, and want to read more from the writer.

The goal of these two features is to discourage flamewars, and encourage better posts and more consistent identities.

Is the "Latest Comments" page going to be turned back on?

Some people are talking about reviving it as "yesterday's comments" so there will be a one-day lag between posting a story and having it show up in a list of comments. (The thinking is that serious dialogue can take place at this pace.)

I'm thinking we might want to require a time lag between postings, so that people can't post more than once per some arbitrary time period. Perhaps this could also extend to comments, so that you can post only one or two replies to a specific article per day. These are more drastic restrictions.

In normal, productive discussions, people take turns speaking. Online, the current software tends to privilege obsessive men who sit at a computer all day and wait in anticipation for their posts to provoke reactions from other similarly obsessive people. :-)

I've got to say I was really disappointed when I came back here after a long absence and saw that you are now sticking cookies on to the computers of web visitors. Don't get me wrong. I know why you're doing it and I think you have good intentions with this new feature ability to add authors to an "ignore list." Please take what I'm about to say as constructive criticism. I'm not here to bitch. But there are some serious issues with what you've done.

At first glance, that's a really cool feature addition. But the bottom-line is that the feature can never work without flaws. Prime Example: There has been a long history of people posting under the screen names used by others, cases specifically where the "bogus" author is attempting to discredit someone. Now, with that feature, it's relatively easy form some goof ball to come here, post a message that is totally vile (e.g., like those gross messages that someone used to post about sheepdog liking his horse and... well, I need not say more). Sure, the messages would always be deleted, but not for a few hours in many cases. And with your new system, that is all that would be needed for some people to decide to zap some specific screen name, and agent provocateurs have more free time than IMC editors. This hypothetical scenario is going to happen.

But the real beef is privacy. Earlier this year, the FBI asked San Francisco's IMC staff to provide server logs of visitors. This was reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, if I remember correctly, and the staff people simply told the FBI that there were no logs to provide because no logs were kept. Now, here you are, sending cookies on to the machines of visitors to power-up the each person's "ignore list," which by definition means that your server keeps a log of that cookie and makes the programmed changes to message thread display on an ongoing basis.

NOT COOL

We don't store any user data on the server. The ignore feature operates solely with cookies. The actual list of names to ignore is stored only on the user's computer. If you wish to verify this, the source code for the feature is available from the window that pops up when you choose to ignore someone. It's linked from the bottom of the page.

A minor feature was added that will help you ignore users who add numbers to their name. Basically, those numbers don't get compared. There are ways to work around this, but, they will make the names look far stupider than johnk1024.