After over 9 months of an open registration system for authors here on the Young Anabaptist Radicals blog, last week I had the first spammer bots sign up for accounts. The names, qwyghxh and lgbletw are familiar to me from other sites I’ve run and likely herald the beginning of a long stream of bots attempting to get by our spam prevention software by signing up as users.
So it is with some reluctance that I’ve made the decision, in consultation with other YAR founders, to move to a closed sign up system for those who wish to write posts on the blog. We currently have 97 users signed up to the site, 41 of whom have contributed at least one post. Now that we’ve built up a critical mass, we can begin to focus a bit more on identifying our vision as a blog and who we want to be.
Of course, this doesn’t mean we can’t have new members. It just means that new members will need to be manually added by a YAR administrator. So if you’d like to write a post for YAR (or know someone who should), email admin@young.anabaptistradicals.org
and explain a bit about why you’re interested.
Well, Jeez Louise, how cool is it that a site claiming to be radical and inclusive and all those good things is now limiting contributions to pre-approved writers. Kind of defeats the purpose, wouldn’t you say?
Kind of defeats the purpose, wouldn’t you say?
Not really… did you read the post? It has nothing to do with limiting contributions. It has everything to do with limiting spam.
It makes complete sense to me.
Thank, Dave. Of course the underlying question that GFYS raises is: What is the purpose of YAR? What does it mean for us to be radical? This is something that we, as a community of writers, are currently working on discovering as part of our visioning process (score 1 for clichéd, but useful terms).
If those of you who are regular commenters rather than authrs have thoughts to share on this question, feel free to share them in this thread.
GFYS shows an obvious bent towards thinking ‘radical’ and ‘inclusive’ are terms that mean putting up with anything anyone throws at us. I suppose that has often been the Anabaptist understanding, but it’s one I would be happy to challenge. I think maybe I will. I feel a post coming on…
I tried to e-mail the above e-mail address and it was returned to me- undeliverable. I guess no one can join now.
Ron,
I apologize for the problem with the address. We’re looking into the problem right now. In the mean time you can email me at nafziger at gmail dot com.