Unless many of you have decided to start selling Viagra in your online pharmacy, comment spam has become a problem for CAAFlog. Fighting these nuisance posts is a time-consuming distraction. To alleviate the problem, I’ve installed a reCAPTCHA widget in the comment form:
If you get illegible words, you can refresh the reCAPTCHA box by clicking the refresh button.
reCAPTCHA doesn’t require a perfect response; it recognizes that some letters look like others. An incorrect response will refresh the comment page and your comment will be lost (the comment box will reappear empty). To recover your comment text, click your browser’s back button. You will have to refresh the reCAPTCHA box before you can continue.
For anyone interested in the technology, reCAPTCHA was profiled on NPR a year ago.
I’m out of here shortly. I’ll be back online in about 72 hours.
I hope the commentariat’s blogging experience is as good here as it was on our old home over at Blogger. Many thanks to Blogger and Google for getting us started. But, I will say, the new digs are like drinking 35 year old Macallan after having Johnnie Walker Red for 3 years.
In case you were wondering, yes, you can still comment anonymously. The email field is there if you want to enter it and receive responses to your comment, but is not a required field.
The new site is live.
Put your comments and criticisms in this post. Save your snark for the club.
Readers-
In the way of
an introduction, I’m a young Marine Judge Advocate brought aboard to help with some technological upgrades (discussed
here and
here), in my personal capacity of course. The switch to the new servers should happen soon – this week, with luck – and will allow CAAFlog to present the full spectrum of commentary, analysis, and information in one place. It also looks pretty good, though some would say my sense of style leaves something to be desired.
We’re working to ensure a minimal loss of content, but a guy like me really embraces the “avoid zero defects” mentality. Posts and comments will transfer (already have), and everything else will remain accessible (we hope, and anything not available in other places will be duplicated). Email is unchanged. The RSS url might change, so subscribers please stay alert.
All said, the technology is just window dressing for the posts and the comments. At the transition there I will solicit feedback on the changes. Be brutal.
As I mentioned last week, we will soon be moving our operations over to caaflog.com. My understanding is that all of our previous blog posts will still be accessible, but all of the documents that are currently on caaflog.com will disappear. We’re planning to take just a few of those docs over to our new site. So if you want a copy of any document that’s on caaflog.com now, please download it in the next 48 hours.
As CAAFlog approaches its third anniversary, we find ourselves about to outgrow our existing digital footprint.
Serendipitously, just as that is about to happen, we received an offer to move all of our operations to a new host that could accommodate both our blog and our website, which makes it possible for us to post content that we can then link to.
Obviously the No Man understands far more about the possibilities for improved “functionality” than this unfrozen caveman lawyer could ever understand. Perhaps the No Man will supplement this post with some of the details.
But here’s what you need to know for now. In about a week, all of the material on our caaflog.com website may disappear. I’m planning to move only a small amount of the material that’s there now to the new website. So if you want anything that’s on caaflog.com, please download it now because it may no longer exist by the end of next week.
[No Man Tech Update: While we may lose some of the documents, we will move all the posts over to a new site. We'll keep the blogger site up in case you have old links to posts (actually that's more of an ego thing for us, as various news stories have linked to CAAFlog posts). Your old bookmark will take you to the new site--so hypochondriacs out there need not worry about extra mouse clicks. We suggest you update your bookmark and RSS feeds once you get to the new site. Our email addresses will remain the same, so feel free to email us with comments about the new site, or how much you liked the old one.]
At the end of last year, we announced a CAAFlog contest to predict which justice would write the Court’s Denedo opinion. Amazingly, even though there were 12 entries in the contest, none predicted Justice Kennedy.
Am I the only one who thinks that, as of late, the comments have become increasingly shrill and/or juvenile?
I’ve stopped reading the comments on every blog I read except for this one. (Of course, my favorite blog — SCOTUSblog — no longer even permits comments.) There are certainly still worthwhile comments on CAAFlog, including (but not limited to) those by JO’C and Sir Cloudesley. But I’m very near the point of thinking that picking out those nuggets is no longer worth the time investment to wade through all the invective.
I believe in the free marketplace of ideas and very rarely delete comments. But I deleted one tonight that treated a fine public servant with incredible (and vulgar) disrespect. I sincerely hope that the anonymous poster who wrote that comment was neither a military officer nor an attorney, because each of our dual professions demands better of us than that.
Can we all please try to elevate the level of discourse to reinstate a useful dialogue in the comment section? And I strongly encourage individuals to post using their own names.
I’ll stand by now for the barrage of rhetorical spitballs that normally follows a call for civility on the web.
Sorry, I’ve been derelict in my blogging duties. Let me give a couple of quick updates, which I’ll expand upon over the weekend.
Most importantly, CAAF released an opinion yesterday in United States v. Von Bergen, __ M.J. ___, No. 03-0629/AF (C.A.A.F. Apr. 2, 2009). In a highly fact-specific decision, CAAF held it was error not to give the accused a new 32 after the original charges went belly up, but held that the error was harmless.
CAAF’s Tuesday daily journal included an interesting summary reversal of a Navy-Marine Corps Court decision. United States v. Thomas, __ M.J. ___, No. 08-0738/NA (C.A.A.F. March 31, 2009).
With Denedo well underway, I thought the time was right to introduce Golden CAAF II. GC2 is seen here transiting the Suez, with the Sinai Peninsula in the background. I’m told it was the site of an initially well-received but ultimately unsatisfactory prototype.
CAAF issued two opinions and the Air Force Court issued a published opinion today. We also have some other news to pass along. But all of that must wait until sometime after 2100.
The No Man has already posted the big news of the day. I may have more updates than time, so today’s posts may stretch into tomorrow.
First off, to current and former Code 45ers, happy Groundhog Day! (Groundhog Day is the quasi-official holiday of Navy-Marine Corps Appellate Defense. Why? Because every day is the same.)
I’ll have a few updates tonight but I’m under the gun this week, so they’ll be quick hits — probably quicker than they deserve.
You’ll notice our posts now have category labels at the bottom. Until now it was an unused feature here on CAAFlog. In light of a suggestion by the ABA Blawg 100, we thought we’d add this feature. Now if you want to see all stories about a particular topic, just click on the label at the bottom of the story. It will take us a bit o’ time to populate labels with old posts (we have over 1,250 of them). With a little work, they’ll all eventually get tagged. All new posts will have labels—and we’ll try to keep the categories to a minimum.
11 Comments 
