Sneaky Comment Trick Proof of Concept

Sat, Nov 24, 2007 at 6:06:29 pm PST

As we noted earlier today, the San Francisco Chronicle is using a sneaky trick in their commenting software; if you post a comment at the SFGate.com web site, and the administrators delete it, you will not know it’s been deleted—because it still shows up when you look at the page, as long as you’re signed in to your SFGate account.

In other words, your comment is not read by anyone else. To you, it appears as if your comment is posted and visible. But everyone else sees a message like, “This comment has been deleted.”

This has two effects:

1) it reduces the grief the administrators have to put up with (no “why did you delete my comment?!!” emails), and

2) it marginalizes and demoralizes the deleted commenter, who has no idea the administrators are doing this, but thinks everyone else is simply ignoring their posts. No one ever reacts to them, and no one ever recommends them. Any chance of real debate simply ... goes away.

It’s a diabolically clever bit of social software engineering. It’s the memory hole, baby. And the hacker in me was intrigued to find out how easily it could be implemented.

It turns out that it took alterations to only 6 lines of code to enable this “feature” at LGF. And it’s activated now.

Gasp.

Now, don’t panic. I haven’t gone over to the dark side.

First of all, here I am telling the world about it, unlike the San Francisco Chronicle.

Second, this is just a test, and I will disable it after checking things out. Maybe. Heh.

Let’s just call it a proof of concept. Here’s an open thread to test this hellish contrivance.