More about “over-eager” young pups at the Clinton campaign.

BlueHampshire.com, a progressive site in the Granite State, has found that several Clinton staff members slipped into sock-puppet mode to beef up the pro-Clinton diary recommendations on its site.

The Caucus learned of this through techpresident.com, which is surprised that anybody still uses sock puppets.

“I’m still amazed that anyone with a basic knowledge of computers would think that they operate anonymously from a campaign office,” Joshua Levy writes. “Haven’t we learned anything from Wikipedia?”

The Caucus too is shocked — shocked! — at the use of sock puppets. We have nothing like that on our site, right readers? We thought sock puppets were “in” for about as long as Paris Hilton’s stay in jail.

In any case, BlueHampshire handled the whole thing with class and their story says a lot about maintaining site integrity in these wild and wooly times.

Blue Hampshire’s Dean Barker writes that the site administrators grew suspicious when they saw that several users had signed up in quick succession. They then discovered that they all used the same IP address, which is registered to the Clinton campaign.

BlueHampshire says that it actually welcomes comments from paid campaign staff members (they may be the site’s most devoted readers, after all), but it just wants them to disclose their affiliations, either through comments or e-mail addresses.

“The fact that all the users mentioned above came from a Clinton campaign IP, but did not register with campaign email addresses, and avoided making comments or diaries, instead only recommending pro-Clinton diaries, strikes us as gaming the system and a form of ‘recommend astroturf,’” Mr. Barker writes. “As a result, we have banned those accounts, and will do so again for undisclosed paid staffers of any campaign if need be.”

Mr. Barker says he discussed the matter with Kathleen Strand, the Clinton campaign’s press secretary in New Hampshire. She “assured us that this was not an orchestrated effort but the product of over-eager staffers and volunteers, done without her awareness, and that it will not be repeated,” he says.

“We appreciate her responsiveness and believe that this may indeed be a misunderstanding of low-level staffers of the norms of the site. Why mention it then? Because while initial acts like these are very small, when a community starts to sense there is no enforcement of the norms of the site, a slow slide into anarchy inevitably begins. It’s our hope by drawing the line here, and showing our willingness to preserve the integrity of discussion on this site, that we will avoid less trivial machinations in the future.”

He then adds this plea for civility: “I’d ask people to be respectful in the comments — Team Clinton is the subject of this post, but it is meant to be a warning shot across the bow of all campaigns. And further, it is the fact that we do manage to have civilized discussions here among opponents that makes this line worth drawing.”