Housekeeping Notes

You may notice that I've added a sidebar gadget for displaying recent comments on the blog. I did this because posts often get comments from people doing research or just curious about old incidents, sometimes as many as 4 years old. Rather than write a new post every time somebody adds interesting info or a question, I thought it would be good if casual readers to the blog could see these otherwise buried comments.

The downside is that comments are sometimes not family friendly or SFW and in the past, if you don't read the comments, you could avoid all that. Angry people calling out perps don't generally have a filter on their emotions and their language reflects that. Having that on the front page of the blog is a risk, I realize, but unless things get really out of hand, I'll let it pass. If somebody does step over the line with threats and abuse, to anybody, I will edit or delete comments, just as I have in the past. I have only had to do that a handful of times in the past and I hope that that will continue.

Longtime readers will notice that I have not been posting as frequently of late, and unfortunately my contributors have been scarce as well. I can't speak for them but I know I've been very busy in the last few months and have had limited time to devote to the crime blog. I will renew my pitch for new contributors, especially for people from south Minneapolis since I don't live there and have only limited sources of information from that area. If you don't want to post, even under a pseudo, I'd be happy to post for you.

Postscript: Awhile back, I implemented comment moderation for comments on posts over 2 weeks old. Which means I have to approve them before they are published. I did this mainly to keep spam comments at bay. Although blogger is pretty good at screening spam, it only took one episode of 50 spam comments being posted overnight on old posts everywhere on the blog to make me do this.