…are not meant to further anyone’s marketing campaign, okay? So don’t be surprised if your promotional URL gets scissored off your comment, or the comment itself gets deleted if its primary purpose appears to be promotional.
And if, worse yet, you’re actually paying a service to go around planting comments of this sort, consider whether there might be better uses of your money.
1) Email to me and to this site has been hit with big delays and disruptions today and is still not working well. If you sent me something important, consider re-sending it.
2) One effect of the disruptions is that the “microblog” (Twitter) plugin has stopped working, hence no scroll of new Twitter posts in the right column. I’ll try to restore it, and in the mean time may try a “homemade” microblog post of highlights.
Intermittent outages have knocked Overlawyered offline for most of the past 24 hours, but it looks as if we’re back now. The problems began with spammer attacks on scripts from our old Movable Type days (moral: if you’re not using old scripts, remove them) and continued with out-of-memory problems.
Some elements of the site may still be missing or not up to date; I’ll be troubleshooting those as the day continues.
Quite an eventful night here: after Glenn Reynolds linked to my item on the Obama transition website and the plans it outlined for mandatory national service, upwards of five thousand visitors read the item and, as I’ve noted in an addendum, the people at Change.gov silently edited the passage in question to replace the controversial “require” language with vaguer talk of a “goal”. (Update Sun. morning: and now they seem to have yanked “Agenda” entirely).
Also, my thanks to commenters for their patience. I went out for an evening in the city and when I got back there were seventy comments in the moderation queue. I approved the whole batch, but inevitably there was one reader who was sure he was being singled out when his comment (#19) didn’t appear after an hour or two. (Update: thanks for correction.)
Prof. Susan Kuo of the University of South Carolina School of Law was in touch today to say that her talk of Thought Police the other day was intended in a spirit of light raillery, not as anything insulting or dismissive of my earlier criticism. Had that been apparent to me, I probably would not have given her post the kind of full-length and unsmiling dissection I did. As I say in a P.S. that I’ve appended to the earlier post, I’m glad to take Prof. Kuo at her word when she says she meant no offense, and I hope commenters will do the same.
The other day we relayed an account of a Ralph Nader rally at Dartmouth whose attendance was said to be eight persons. Other coverage now indicates that the number eight is the approximate number of Dartmouth students in attendance, and that other attendees brought the crowd count up to forty. Sorry.
For quite a while I’ve been getting complaints that readers in other countries — Australia, in particular — are locked out of Overlawyered with a “403 — you don’t have permission to access the server” error message. (Similarly, see these bulletin board discussions from New Zealand and Germany). Reader Stephen Mepham from Australia wrote to alert me when he encountered this problem on switching to a new cable provider, and helpfully included his IP number (the 777.77.7.777 thing). That allowed me to track down what had happened: in response to a series of spam and denial-of-service attacks, our hosting providers over the years have taken aggressive measures to exclude various large blocks of IP numbers (as well as country domains associated with spam and DOS attacks). I’ve now taken a few gingerly steps to relax these controls, which I hope should let more Australian readers access the site in particular. Should the attacks resume, of course, we’ll need to go back to tougher blocking.
If you’re a reader who’s encountered this problem or knows someone who has, give it a try again, and feel free to email me with a message along the lines of “Yes, now it works again” or “No, I still get blocked” — and try to include your IP address if convenient, which you can identify here.
As alert readers may have noticed, I began using Twitter recently (@walterolson) and have been experimenting over the past week with what it can do. I’ve now added Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress, which makes it possible to integrate blog functions with those of Twitter. I’m giving a tryout to two new functions:
* Now featured atop the rightmost column of this site is a list of my five most recent Twitter posts. Some are ultra-brief summaries of Overlawyered or Point of Law posts, while others point to law-related articles or news stories in lieu of writing them up at full post length, and yet others contain non-law-related or even personal content. If you want to keep abreast with these in something close to real time without coming back to visit the site itself, “follow” @walterolson (on your Twitter account) or use the @walterolson RSS feed (distinct from the regular Overlawyered posts and comments feeds).
* Once a day Twitter Tools will generate an Overlawyered post like this one summing up the last day’s Twitter mini-posts (”tweets”). In their native form, these roundups have a rather raw look, replete with artificially truncated URLs (of the tinyurl and is.gd variety), often not identifying the article source, etc. If time and inclination permits, I’ll try to clean these up and make them more Overlawyered-relevant by reinserting “real” URLs, via links, earlier/further reading, etc., maybe cutting pure personal stuff, etc.
* Here’s a list of lawyers and law types on Twitter. I’m listed at #230.
* This is all, obviously, experimental, and aimed at seeing whether the new formats appeal to existing readers and reach new ones. If it does work well, I might take further steps, such as systematically broadcasting Overlawyered content on Twitter (a reader volunteer might come in really useful on that). One step at a time, though.
* More: If you’re a reader whose Twitter posts might furnish good story tip material for this site, and I realize that, there’s a good chance I’ll try following you; I’ve already done three posts using material I found in Twitter streams. (This is by contrast with Facebook, where I follow a more conservative policy, and mostly accept as friends only those I “really” know or at least have emailed with a fair bit).
Many of our RSS feed subscribers lost their Overlawyered feeds when we switched platforms to WordPress this spring. I’ve just installed a plugin that should get things moving again, redirecting everyone to a single main feed for the site; those who want to follow comments can subscribe to this separate comments feed. If it doesn’t work for you, let me know.
Here. For the moment this is just a personal one; after I learn more about how it works I might try to get Overlawyered its own Twitter.
If you’re on Facebook, we’ve already pestered you to sign up as a “Fan” of Overlawyered. If you’re also on the BlogNetworks application, we’d like to pester you to take an additional step: visit the Overlawyered page there, become a reader, and confirm that I am indeed the owner/proprietor. Once a relatively small number of readers do these things, the system will pick us up and we’ll have a new avenue of distribution.
I mostly leave regular visitors alone to say what they want in our comments section, whether or not I agree. That being said:
Given this site’s subject matter, we often find ourselves talking about cases of injury or death that pose unthinkable tragedies to the persons and families involved. Given the identifying material in the stories, it is inevitable that members of those families, or others who deeply care about the injured persons, or the persons themselves, will at some point come to the site and read what we have said.
When we voice our disagreement with the claims made in resulting lawsuits, it can be helpful to imagine those family members’ faces as being among those in the audience, and let our words be shaped accordingly. I’m sure I sometimes fall short of following this advice myself, but when I do follow it, I always feel like more of a grown-up.
In case you missed it, yesterday’s post on the disputes over bandwidth, cable speeds and BitTorrent has prompted an unusually rich discussion with contributions from many knowledgeable readers — I know I’ve learned a lot. Check it out here.
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We continue to hear reports, scattered and so far unexplained, from readers around the world who get an “unavailable” or “forbidden” message when they call up http://www.overlawyered.com in their browser. Thus some readers in Australia have no problem with access to the site, while others have reported that they are blocked; and we got a similarly inconsistent report the other day from New Zealand.
The Australian lawyer who writes the interesting blog Stumblng Tumblr writes to say that
I have outflanked the problem. I only regret that it took me so long to think of it. I use Bloglines and it permits me to choose how much of a feed I want to see in Bloglines itself. It finally occurred to me to change the setting for Overlawyered to show the full post in Bloglines in every case, rather than just a summary. That means that I don’t have to go to your site. I just read it all in Bloglines.I’m very happy to be able to read Overlawyered again!
Without our loyal audience we wouldn’t have made it through nine years — and wide acclaim as the oldest legal blog, as well as one of the most popular. In yesterday’s thread, reader Greg Dwyer says he has “read every single post on this site” (I’m impressed) while reader M.T. Glass discovered this blog (a word that didn’t exist then, if memory serves) when it was less than two months old.
Partly in consequence of our popular WordPress redesign we’ve also been setting new traffic records, regularly surpassing 9,000 and often hitting 10,000 unique daily visitors. Thanks for your support! (& welcome Above the Law, National Arbitration Forum, Law Crossing, Point of Law readers).
Added to the favorites sidebar on the right: our contemporaneous coverage of the case of the finger in the Wendy’s chili. Any other favorites you’d like to see there?
Point of Law Volokh