Well, yesterday was quite a day. I'm now ready, I think, to start to go over the facts, and try to set it all straight. (Deep breath.) There are two separate issues to address, so this is just the first post: Sock Puppets. We had sock puppets on the "Intersection," and we weren't aware of it until recently, thanks to the revelations of The Buddha is Not Serious. We had not been in the habit of checking IP addresses or trying to root out these kinds of things. Indeed, at times I would just let our filters run and not even look at what most commenters were saying, especially when threads ran over 100 comments long and I was busy with other things. I see now that there were people abusing the privilege of posting comments on our blog. We've banned the offending IPs that have been discovered and we're also considering further actions to rein in some kinds of comments that don't contribute anything or engage in baseless attacks, etc. To those legitimate commenters who were annoyed by bad behavior---and had reason to be!--I'm sorry we didn't catch on to what was really happening before now. And I want to emphasize: That apology goes out to ANY commenters who may have ...