So I was reading this thread on John Quiggin’s blog when the discussion turned to Tim Blair’s policy of banning any dissenters from commenting on his blog. (See here for an example of the sort of comment that will get you banned.) Now Blair doesn’t have to support comments from people that disagree with him, but there are free commenting systems available, so I set up Haloscan so that people could comment without being banned. I also wrote a little CGI proxy script that people could use to add links to the Haloscan comments under each of Blair’s posts.

Tim Blair got rather upset, apparently believing that I had made a copy of his content to create a mirror. Ken Parish was concerned that the proxied version could be mistaken for the real thing, so I modified the proxy so it clearly indicated that the user was looking at a modified version of the blog. Guy Tsafnat reckoned that I had gone too far.

Meanwhile Blair called my Head of School several times to complain. My HoS checked with UNSW’s lawyers who said that they didn’t think that there was anything wrong with my proxy. However, they were concerned that some people might mistakenly think that UNSW was hosting a copy of Blair’s blog, so I offered to move the script off site.

Now Blair offers an RSS feed on his site. If you click on that link you will see that it is not very readable. That’s because it’s not meant to be directly browsed, but displayed by a feed reader. These can display the content in an enormous variety of ways and add links to other relevant material. For example, the one I use adds links to a Technorati search for links to each post. Feed readers can be desktop applications or web-based. The web based readers are sites which read in RSS feeds and reformat the information into html so that it can be displayed in a browser. If you go to any of dozens of sites you can read Blair’s blog on that site instead of Blair’s.

Anyway, Blair called me and asked me take it down. I asked him if would object to my taking his RSS feed and displaying it with links to the Haloscan comments. Unfortunately he did not know that he had an RSS feed or even what that was. I tried to explain what that was but Blair would not say whether or not he would object. At some stage Blair threatened me with the Packer lawyers. Packer owns the Bulletin, the magazine that Blair works for. He did not think that it was fair that he was singled for having comments added. According to Blair his comments policy was not particularly different from Ken Parish, who sometimes closes comment threads. After some discussion Blair hung up on me, warning that if it wasn’t taken down today we would hear from his lawyers.

Meanwhile, drscroogemcduck posted an elegant bookmarklet that lets you add the Haloscan links from inside your browser. (It only works from Firefox.) I thought was a nice solution so I replaced the proxy with a redirect to the bookmarklet. Next, Blair’s lawyer called my HoS and also UNSW’s lawyer to demand that the proxy be taken down. (It already had been, but the lawyer seemed unaware of this.) I don’t know whether this was one of the “Packer lawyers” that Blair had referred to earlier.

Interestingly, the alternative Haloscan comments were getting many more comments than Blair’s real ones until Blair posted this comment:

Can I ask all timblair.net regulars to stop commenting here. This is exactly what he wants and you’re only encouraging him.
And all the Blairites, who seemed to be enjoying having people to debate with for once, dutifully returned to their cocoon.

Update: The comment was actually posted by a Tim Blair impersonator. The Blairites took their marching orders from a fake Blair.

A handy hint from drscroogemcduck:

Avocadia has adapted my script for greasemonkey and made it look a bit nicer (I think). Greasemonkey will automatically run the script each time you visit blair’s site. After installing greasemonkey you can install the script by right clicking on this link and selecting “Install User Script”.
You need Firefox for this version as well.