Dear patient readers,
I hope you are having a wonderful holiday season, either via enjoying Christmas festivities, or if you do not observe Christmas, by taking advantage of the typical year-end activity break.
We will be on a lighter posting schedule, with only Links and two other daily posts through and including New Year’s Day. I believe Lambert will keep up Water Cooler most days but he really should take a break too.
We will give our moderator a break, which means I will be the only one moderating comments, so it could be quite a while before they are freed, particularly ones posted in the afternoon US time. Keep in mind we are being nicer than in the past, when we had comments holidays, of turning comments off entirely to give the mods a break.
Regarding moderation, we are now critically short-handed. One of our moderators quit over the summer to take up better money-making opportunities. Moderator katiebird was able to take up his hours. However, our longest-standing moderator Jules just resigned over finding the comments to be so toxic that it was affecting her health.
We have two resulting problems. First is that Jules was volunteering her time, so it is not as if her having resigned frees up budget to pay for another moderator. The second is that WordPress is set up so that only administrators can moderate comments. This is perverse because it has a “Editor” role which can edit any post, but an editor cannot moderate comments.
So not only do we have a budget issue, we also have the problem that we have to really know and trust anyone who might act as a moderator.
Anyway, please be patient. We are doing the best we can.
P.S. The photo is from mgl, who adds: “Spotted this in my neighborhood of Bootlegger Cove in Anchorage AK a few years back.”
