Thanks to those of you who contributed to help support Free Keene’s advertisements in 2010. Ads were purchased all year long on the Ridley Report, Free Minds TV and Radio, and Liberty Conspiracy. I am going to continue advertising in these venues as it supports some great NH-based liberty media and simultaneously gets the word out about Free Keene to people outside NH. I’ve created another chip-in to help cover the costs. Thank you again for your help!
Just a quick FYI – many of you have noticed that the trolls were easily able to exploit the Comment Ratings software. The programmer claims he’s working on a better version. If that is released, the feature may be re-enabled, but the mandatory user registration policy has successfully reduced the drive-by anonymous trolling, which was the original intent of the ratings software.
As Free Keene enters its fifth year, thank YOU for reading, participating, and making us relevant! Hopefully this will be your year to move to New Hampshire!
Apparently a wordpress plugin had broken the registration email process here on the blog. New registrants were not sent initial registration emails but should the person have requested a password reset, it did send that out. Anyway, it’s fixed now and so if you have registered for an account and did not get the email, please try the password reset. If you have not yet registered for an account, you can easily do so now. Please use the login widget in the top right sidebar.
It is with some regret that I make this announcement. You may have noticed that Free Keene has been going through some growing pains recently with a tremendous amount of nastiness coming from anonymous trolls in the comments section. This is to be expected as the site has grown significantly and now exceeds over 50,000 visits per month. With that popularity comes trouble from the haters. For a long time the hateful trolls were tolerated, but some were saying they were driving people away from the site. My websites have always welcomed dissent and open discussion and that will still be welcome here – it’s just that now you’ll need to be logged in to the site to comment, in the same way that you need to be logged in to the Forum to post there
This should still allow the people with serious critique to contribute while preventing the “drive-by” anonymous posters of vitriol. In order to facilitate you signing up and logging in, I’ve added a login widget to the right panel of the site. Make sure to check your spam filter if you don’t see the verification email after you sign up.
Each user having accounts should also eliminate the problem we have had with three different “David”s posting on the same comment thread, making it very difficult to discern who-was-who.
Hopefully this change combined with the new comment voting feature will help skew the comments more in a constructive, conversational direction rather than the troll slugfest that it has been recently.
Some have said the negativity from the trolls in the comments of each post has driven them away from the site. To help improve the comment viewing experience, you and the rest of the readers here are now in control. You can now vote up or down on comments – the less popular ones will be hidden from the default view!
Thanks for your help in making our site better!
There has long been critique surrounding this blog that it’s all about civil disobedience, when nothing could be further from the truth. From its early days, Free Keene has been a source for blogs about all manner of activism in Keene and NH, including politics. We have covered the campaigns of liberty-lovers for state house and city council throughout the last four years. However those posts are typically overshadowed by the civil disobedience because CD is so atypical and politics not-so-much, plus civil disobedience can happen anytime while politics is usually relegated to the campaign seasons. I had extended an invitation to local democrat Will May to blog here a long time back, so as to add extra balance to the content of Free Keene, and he has finally accepted. Free Keene welcomes as our newest blogger, Will May, the founder of the NH secessionist website, NHBloom.org. Here’s his bio:
Will May (“Skeptikos”) – Will is not a libertarian. He moved to Keene in 2008 for the Free State Project, and, after one too many books by Paul Krugman, took a sharp turn to the left. Having been critical of Free Keene in the past, he intends to be the opposition blogger, providing an alternative perspective and the occasional debate. He still has a strong anti-authoritarian streak, however, and is working to promote a liberal-libertarian alliance in Keene.
Read about our other bloggers on the Bloggers page.
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