Holy crap, LJ's down. How can I make last minute birthday requests? How can I get to the pictures of intarweb people wishing me a happy birthday to display during tonight's party? How will I go on?

This post is just absolutely amazing. An entire thread of replies, hundreds of them, moderated down to -1 repeatedly. krow, a Slashcode guru, moderated to oblivion. The comment itself has been moderated well over a hundred times.

Despite finding the trolls the most entertaining and amusing part of /. I do agree that the thread is off topic in nature. I do agree that any thread such as that should be moderated off topic in such a story. There is no meta discussion topic, there are so few stories about /. itself. But krow has a very good point, we can discuss these things in user created threads. We can discuss these things in journal entries. There are ways they have allowed us to discuss /. from within. There are ways that we can discuss these matters without breaking the social mores that the current moderation system has created. And, amazingly, ' they ' do listen.

It's their sandbox. They set the ground rules, they could be fascist iron-fisted operators like some discussion boards have. Many of the trolls complain due to the stance of allowing free speech and supporting rights online not jiving up with IP banning and the lameness filter. But they have given us, the users, a few ways to talk. Secret SIDs were a bug, something that they didn't have to let people talk in. Since they became so popular, they've actually given us tools to talk about anything... including them... including them in a negative way. Let's use it, let's play by their rules.