Yesterday I had a really great comment I tried to post. It was for Jerome ah Paree's diary, Dammit people: it's 'a Paris', not 'Paris'. Evidently he was not satisfied with his three hundred recs in his tip jar, because he posted a whole bunch of other tip jars, each of which raked in what for me would be a month's worth of mojo. (Damn, Monsieur a Paris, you could take the next six months off and still keep your Trusted User status. Mine goes away if I oversleep.) Other people added their own tip jars, albeit with somewhat less success.
So I had this great idea (this is just great!): I would put up a tip jar of my own, sort of. Since the comment-to-be is now gone with the wind, I'll have to show a photo of what it would have looked like, to wit:
You get it? It's a comment designed to look exactly like one of his! You get it now? And I'm the first Kossack out of, oh, say, 130,000 or so who's ever thought of it!
Ok, its not hilarious or anything, but it was cute & took a lot of effort. If you clicked on "Jerome a Paris" you got a picture of Mickey Mouse, "Reply to this" brought up Donald Duck, "Oil Drum" brought up an image of an oil drum, and so on. Real cute. (Hey, lay off me! I had a rough week.) It took a while to do, maybe twenty or thirty minutes. So I was just a tad proud of myself when I clicked "post".
(Oh, and note the time on at the bottom of the aspiring comment.)
So anyhoo, I clicked on "post" and of course, nothing happened. I tried several more times and nothing happened. Well, ok, if you want to get all technical on me, something happened: "Comment failed," with a little yellow thingy that's a cross between a "yield" sign and a warning that you're about to be electrocuted. Not wanting to mess with my beautiful, unbacked-up comment, I opened a new tab & tried to bring up DKos, and I of course got the message:
505 Internal Server Error.
[blah blah blah inform somebody blah blah blah]
Whoa! What had I done this time?
Of course my first thought was: "Holy cow, I've been autobanned!" Hey, I've never been banned before so I didn't know what would happen. All I knew was the site was working fine and I tried to post that comment and now I couldn't get through. And the error message didn't clearly state that it was the site that had gone down. It just said something sorta like I couldn't get through & I should contact someone about it & it's probably your fault. (They really ought to write those, well, more clearly.)
I thought maybe that was the kind of thing that wingnuts and Republicans and trolls (oops, sorry for the redundancy) liked to do: spoof our comments to make them look just like someone else's! (Well I don't know, if I were a wingnut Republican troll maybe that's what I would spend my time doing instead of, say, registering voters or volunteering for Iraq.)
I thought, too, that maybe DKos has an algorithm that detects spoofed comments and autobans whoever tries to post them, because obviously the only people who would even think about doing that, much less actually do it, are wingnut Republican trolls. Would DKos do that? Why the hell not? It was right there, plain as day, in the FAQ... right? Isn't it? (I really oughta maybe read the FAQ next time.) All these year(s) I've been on here I've been squeaky clean, never had a comment hidden since my first one (It was all a misunderstanding, I swear! I'm not a wingnut Republican troll!), and rarely a donut (mmmmmmm... donuts...). But now I've transgressed the unwritten law, and the Mighty Hand of Kos has reached down ... er, automatically ... and squashed me like a bug. Like a bug! LIKE A DAMN BUG!
Actually, the thought did flit across my walnuttian mind that maybe, by trying to post that comment, I had crashed the whole site myself. Maybe the whole comment-within-a-comment thing created a sort of infinite looping timewarping wormholey kind of... thing... (Error! Error! Must analyze! A-NA-LYZE...!) and now across the blogosphere, server after server was crashing in a cascading, daisy-chaining, chain-smokingreacting kind of... thing. Could it be...?
Naw, that's just stupid. I've been autobanned.
(Question: Do German Kossacks get "autobahned"? Anyone...? I'm here through Thursday. Try the veal.)
And yeah, I did, for a moment -- just for a moment -- think that maybe it was, y'know, just, y'know, coincidence that I had hit the "post" button on a rather outré comment (Hey, you like that, Jerome? "Outré"?) and at just the same time BANG! the site goes down. Yeah. Right. No connection, just a coinkydink. Of all the times that the site would go down, of course it had to go down right then (wink wink). Hah! I don't think so. Moving on...
I clicked on my DKos button again and again and again, because of course the definition of "insanity" is rejecting the wise old saying, "if at first you don't succeed, try try again." (I'm not insane, I'm really not. Heh heh.) 505 Internal Server Error. 505 Internal Server Error. 505 Internal Server Error. Now say that thirty times real fast. I did last night.
I tried to get through on my wife's computer but of course I couldn't. "505 Internal Server Error. Go Away." Hell, even my sockpuppets couldn't get on. I thought, "Sh*t, Kos knows every computer I log in from & has them all blocked! My computers probably have more cookies on them then a picnic table at a Keebler company picnic." I figured that tomorrow (that's today "tomorrow," not tomorrow "tomorrow.") I would have to get on my virtual knees & crawl to the admins & beg them to take me back. PleasepleasepleaseIreallydidntmeanitohplease. First I had to get rid of the evidence, so I deleted the offending proto-comment, but not before making an image of it, in case I had to show The Man what I wasn't guilty of. Hence the above.
Well, to make a long story even longer, after a while I’m starting to have DKos withdrawal. I guess mojo is now the fifth food group and more addictive than heroin. (And no, patches don't work with DKos, I've discovered.) Fortunately, at this critical juncture I courageously chose to continue breathing in a daring and ultimately successful effort to stave off oxygen deprivation. (Ok, I plagiarized that line from some really old publication. You'll never know which one.)
You know those old post-apocalyptic movies where everyone is wiped out & the survivors are twirling their pre-digital radio dials and tapping on their home-made Morse telegraph sets, hoping to get a signal & wondering if there is anyone else left alive out there? This was kinda like that for me. I didn't know whether there really was anybody else out there doing the same thing, or whether you were all dead from plague or nuclear radiation, or whether you had all gathered at that one last intact shopping mall in Daily Kosville (Daily Kosovo?) called Post-Your-Naked-Photos Friday.
So there I am, my strength running out, feebly clicking on one of the two Daily Kos buttons I have mounted on my bookmarks toolbar (one for the front page, one that goes directly to my comments. Great idea, huh? Gimme royalties if you use it) and all of a sudden I get ct's message about maintaining something or tweaking something or something something. Who cares what it said? I got a signal! I hadn't been autobanned after all! Hurrah!!! (Er, of course not. How ridiculous! Who would think they'd been, y'know, autobanned, heh heh, just because they got, y'know, a "505 Internal Server Error"? That's just stupid!... ha ha ha....)
My first reaction after getting back on?
"Oh thank God! It's just the site that's crashed!"
My next thought?
"Hey, how come the comments I made just before the site went down don't have any more recs?"
UPDATE: Reduced the size of the photo to uncover the recommend button. (Apparently some people couldn't reach the Recommend button. How's that for irony?)