3 responses to “Tireless civil rights crusaders not so smug now”

1. 

   granville

   11/13/2024

   Haven’t seen that email bug but no email required? Cool!

   The Backpage story is horrendous, and to be honest the only people I saw who were denouncing it for years was “Reason,” the libertarian magazine, I’m glad to see that credited because I would have never heard about it, or just dismissed the whole thing as tech making classifieds into “a Grubhub but for prostitution” if not for “Reason.” They may have had their own agenda from the start but eventually the injustice of hounding one guy into his fucking grave superseded whatever free market angle they were working. It was gross, and everyone involved in it should be pilloried, but they won’t be.

   Reply
   1. 

      Doug Holland

      11/13/2024

      Reason is still on it, they’re the force driving behind that article on Techdirt.

      Reason does good work, when they’re not batshit crazy. Once or twice a year I see something great from those guys, and add Reason to my regular surf cycle, and then they post something batshit crazy and I delete my link. Life is like that, too.

      Reply
   2. 

      Doug Holland

      11/14/2024

      Last word on the bug is, it’s fixed. For anyone interested, here’s what’s been explained to me:

      The problem was caused by a setting for the site’s comments: “Show comments cookies opt-in checkbox, allowing comment author cookies to be set”. This meant that if a user checked the box then their browser would populate the comment forms fields with the saved information on page load, and has the side effect that if the page being loaded hasn’t previously been cached by our platform that day, then that information will be present in the cached copy of the page that is then served to other visitors after that point.

      The fields are populated when the page is built on the server, rather than being dynamically inserted after the page is loaded, and as a result the data is cached at the server, not in the user’s browser, if the page hadn’t previously been cached that day.

      That was WordPress’s default setting, which seems nuts to me, but it’s now been disabled. The site’s server-side cache has also been purged, multiple times, which (I’m told) should prevent this from happening again.

      As an extra precaution, the comment box will no longer ask for an email address, so if this does happen again, the only info that could possibly be shared is another user’s published non de plume. That’s still weird and wrong, but it’s better than sharing an email address.

      Reply

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