I’m very pleased to report that our small website has recently been attracting very strong traffic. Prior to March we’d never quite broken 3 million monthly pageviews, but July put us well above 3.5 million, and August seems likely to be nearly as strong.

I’ve also been extremely pleased with the success of my own recent article American Pravda: John McCain, Jeffrey Epstein, and Pizzagate, which has been more popular than almost anything else I’ve published over the last few years, while attracting 1.2K Facebook Likes and over 85,000 words of comments.

Meanwhile, for convenience sake, I’ve also added sidebar links to the full collection of both my American Pravda series and my major Race/Ethnicity articles, allowing individuals interested in those particular topics to conveniently explore them.

On a different matter, I recently added some commenting restrictions to the website, aimed at preventing threads from being overly monopolized by just a handful of particularly enthusiastic participants. The system now limits individuals to no more than 10 comments per hour, of which no more than 4 can be directed to a particular thread. Anonymous commenters (e.g. “Anonymous” or “Anon”) are limited to 4 total comments per hour, and a very small handful of particularly “spammish” commenters have been placed under tighter restrictions. These limits exclude “Opinions” (e.g. Agree/Disagree/etc), which remain at 1 per hour.

Offhand, these seem like rather generous limits that should hardly impact reasonable and well-behaved commenters, while preventing the accumulation of too much clutter. But those who feel otherwise should so indicate, as well as reporting any problems they have encountered with this new system.

Finally, I’ve tried to improve the readability of extremely popular articles, which naturally tend to attract large numbers of comments. The quantity of those comments often renders such articles slow to load and difficult to navigate, thereby preventing visitors from conveniently accessing them. Since the vast majority of such comments are usually produced in the first few weeks after an article’s release, by default I’ve now hidden the commenting portion of all articles that have more than 400 comments and were published more than a month in the past, though clicking any of the commenting-related links unhides the commenting section and allows additional replies.