When BlueOregon went that way, it was like they took away the water cooler at work.

Now it's just a bunch of cheerleading with Jack Roberts and a couple of others playing the role of the Washington Generals.

I would strongly suggest a separate commenting fb account.

I started fb through some boredom related to health isolation. I did the games at first. Mafia wars was cool because I could game the system. I made multiple accounts so my gang members (all me) could work together. That was fun for about a week and as i got better, I hated games.

My main fb account is strictly for close fam and friends. I have to keep up with privacy changes. But basically don't post all the stuff others do.

Years ago I would build whole personas for people complete with wedding, family pictures for friends-all fake of course. If the Statesman wants some of that action (and if I even read it) Just give me an otherwise bored night. What is even more fun is to create several different ones arguing on the same thread. Oh wait. Did you know there is a program to do just that? Yup! you heard of anonymous? They destroyed the company that developed it.

So Party on. Pick a cool name, fb it! Comment away!

The Columbian switched to Facebook June 1.

However, readers may go to http://www.columbian.com/news/forums/ and join a forum that doesn't use FB. You must register for an account. Only your user name is revealed so you may remain anonymous. Recently, the Columbian has added Captcha to the process. The LA Times uses the same method.

There are ongoing conversations in the Forum that are lively and robust. For the most part, they are thoughtful and well written. Last week there were 260 contributions and the week before there were 364. Many of the discussions focus on national issues rather than local news.

The Forum regulars refer to it as the "basement" or the "penthouse".

Libby Tucker of the Columbian wrote the following 11/23:

Libby Tucker, The Columbian’s Web editor, said Wednesday she wrote in the newspaper’s entry that “Columbian.com this year set out to improve civic discourse on important issues and increase accountability both online and offline with community initiatives.”

“Like most daily newspapers on the Web, The Columbian has struggled with anonymous commenters who bring down the level of discourse and prevent productive conversations from happening. On June 1, we became a leader among other mid-sized dailies when we switched our commenting system to Facebook and required the use of real names to comment on our stories. Since then, we’ve seen a dramatic improvement in the quality of comments as well as the variety of community members who are now participating. Other Washington papers are now following our lead and switching to this new platform,” Tucker wrote.

I second the fake FB account, easy to set up. I recommend setting up fake identities all together to protect yourself, namely from government minions. The corporations do it, why not you. I'm just scratching the surface of the benefits of incorporating.

Freedom and rights for everyone!

There is no free lunch or ways to hide on FB.

Dream on!

There is no free lunch or ways to hide on FB.

Actually, that's an inaccurate assessment.

Folks are always claiming things like "there's no way to hide" on AlGore's invention, the Internet. It's amusing.

It's also wrong.

There are any number of ways to "hide", if you want to; spoofing an IP address is perhaps among the most trivial, and therefore most often used. It's easy to make it look as though you're coming from Europe, Russia, or San Francisco.

Get a simple free email address-there are a lot of them.
Sign up for facebook.

Oh DOH!

Now this is for simple snarking on comments.

If you're stupid enough to do illegal stuff, with that above, you deserve to get caught. Those smart enough to have higher layers of internet secrecy are usually to smart to do illegal stuff.

Another aside. Jack has posted in the past how an irritated reporter can pull up a bunch of comments from the same person and figure out who they are.

Surf's Up!

The world would be a more civil place if there was accountability for comments.

Giverny - I disagree with Tucker's claim that "Since then, we’ve seen a dramatic improvement in the quality of comments as well as the variety of community members who are now participating."

Under the new system, I'm seeing hardly any comments in the real estate articles, esp. around foreclosures and median sales price articles.

The quality of comments on perhaps the Columbian's most important recent article, Boldt's yanking his support for the baseball stadium, doesn't come close to those found here.