The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    An Open Letter to Josh Marshall

    Josh,

    I know you've written before that the Cafe Reader Blogs cost more to maintain than they're worth--or something close to that.

    But frankly, I don't see how you could expect them to generate much revenue when 10 hours of every day, the front page of the Reader Blog is dominated by spam after spam after spam posts--all generated automatically in red hyperlinks that make the aggregate blog load glacially slow and that force ACTUAL reader posts off the page and off the Recent Posts list.

    Who in their right mind would pay to advertise on such a compromised site?

    So shit, man, get with it! You would NEVER allow the pages of TPM, TPM Cafe or any other subdomain flying the TPM banner to be attacked day after day in this manner.

    Yet you allow it on the Reader Blogs.

    Fix it, man! Plug the hole, for Pete's sake!

    Your readers are all you have, and when the Reader Blogs go to hell and people finally get fed up, you'll be left with a handful of hyper-partisan spammers and become just another political news portal that I and many, many others will skip past with bittersweet memories of once having had a place to vent and learn and educate.

    This inattention to proper site security is bullshit and you know it.