Since the BNP demise thread transmogrified into a thread warfare thread, I thought it might be helpful to augment previous advice on comment style and content with a few practical tips on staying alive in the thread war.

Choosing your battleground

Different media have widely differing accessibilities for nationalists and tolerances for nationalist opinion. We are, though, engaged in a war for control of the discourse, and that means finding the level of truth-speaking at which it is possible to participate.

Pre-moderated media, such as the Daily Mail and the BBC, tend not only to exclude the possibility of an exchange of opinion, but weed out radically pro-white comment. These media have, in my view, to be addressed later, if and when the general discourse has been liberalised. The place to start is post-moderated sites on the political right, where the tenor of comment provides more cover. Post-moderated sites on the left, like CiF, New Statesman, and The Independent are good places to conduct raids but are not relevant to the campaign as such (though they have utility when the left is in power).

The Daily Telegraph is clear favourite among the dailies in Britain. It has the advantage of separate DISQUS systems for the general comment and news system and for the blog system, so a user-name ban in one does not imply a user-name ban in the other (a full IP ban does, though).

The DT website attracts as many unique IP visits in a day as MR does in a year, and is popular with UKIP members and other semi-aware conservatives, particularly those without much love for Islam. Rather oddly, over the last year or two the shift in what gets past the moderators has been very noticeable, but I’m not so sure about the opinions of the commentariat. Of the great numbers of those who read quietly and never leave a comment, we can know nothing, of course.

Self-authoriality at last

The choice of user-name is something else to ponder. It may not be a great idea to label yourself Blood Axe or Vengeance of the Reich. As it is, all the envelope-pushing in which you engage will provide the trigger-happy black Jewish transsexual moderator with quite enough excuse to ban you. There is no need for a flashing neon sign above the detonate button.

So select a neutral user-name. For registration sites you will have to set up a mail account somewhere like Hotmail, and that tends to eliminate the most common name combinations. If you are blogging for the English cause, either choose a good Anglo-Saxon name or, if you want to draw your victims onto the hook, one that rhymes in an innocent-seeming way with any of the usual sin-words. Anti-racists find it extremely difficult to pass up the opportunity to label us, and are all perfectly oblivious to when the tables are about to be turned.

You might consider developing a series of related user-names, so that some reader recognition can be built notwithstanding the moderator’s toll. But you will need to mix things up a bit with some unrelated user-names to confuse the moderator and make it more difficult for him to maintain a consistent banning methodology. This is very important, and probably explains, rather than the power of our argument, why the limits on our speech do indeed retreat.

I don’t bother with avatars because I am banned too frequently (and most frequently for pointing out that homosexuals are not equal in Nature, and next for driving Jews nuts). But a distinct symbol beside your comments will certainly help the reader to pick them out from the crowd, and is probably worthwhile. Again, it might help if you don’t plump for the Das Reich motif.

You will need more than one live identity. At any given time I have three running, sometimes two on the same thread. If one is banned mid-debate, the other can take over and complete the exercise. Be sure to maintain a note of all your IDs and their log-in details.

Just browsing

Your browsers are your friends, and you should download them all and press them into service in this war. That means, if you are using a Windows platform, downloading Mozilla, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. Early Maxthon versions had the facility to generate phantom IP addresses. But that seems to have gone missing on later versions. Maxthon, which is a derivative of IE, is still worth having, though, so add it to the list.

The point here is that because they store cookies independently, all browsers enable you to establish different user-names from the same computer. Not all media sites and agents such as DISQUS primarily identify commenters by IP address. They tend to ban user-names, in which case the determinant for access is the cookie in your browser’s temp folder. You can run different user-names from the same computer until your IP address is finally banned (then see below).

How to be read

One way to be read and not be passed over, as I explained above, is to win a loyal following. If you are really intent on pushing the envelope that will necessitate a series of identifiably related user-names. The quality of your commentary has to justify the interest, of course. I have seen both on Facebook, when I used it to log-in as the original Piggott, and on DISQUS as philwicks, that people do follow higher quality commentary, and, on Facebook, do contact the commenter to ask questions.

However, the surest way to be certain of being read is to post early on the thread, at least at sites like the DT with different ways to arrange the comments (newest, oldest, most recommended), and like CiF, which ranks from the oldest. Get in early on a topical thread - say in the first ten comments - and post a pithy, relevant and perhaps slightly rebarbative comment and you can see the recommends climb into the hundreds. I reckon you can safely multiple that by fifty to one hundred more to arrive at a ballpark number of actual readers.

For the most part, of course, you will just be joining the crowd of later posters, most of whom attract no recommends at all. Go for the scatter-gun approach - four or five short comments at least, again rebarbative, all close to the tail of the thread. Some poor deluded soul will usually provide you with the opportunity to demonstrate the supremacy of your analysis.

Remember that the later you join the thread the less it is necessary to post a comprehensive and definitive comment. As long as it attracts a challenge there will be plenty of opportunity to make your case.

The privacy factor

One of the media sites that pre-moderates is the AOL-owned Huffington Post. They require a registration, of course, and that process leads one directly to the following non-negotiable conditions:

The Huffington Post will be able to see your profile information, including your name, gender, display picture, contacts and friends. The Huffington Post will have access to your email address and those of your contacts. The Huffington Post will be able to see and update your information, even when you’re not using this application.

These people want their pound of flesh, not too great a problem given that none of your actual details will be stored on-line for them to harvest. But they also hire out their page to an ugly group of IP address trackers, web bugs, and what-have-you to collate data about your web behaviour.

There are over a thousand trackers out there, and while one or two - Disqus for instance - have to be accommodated in order to use their facility, the great majority are unwelcome to anyone in our line of work.

Happily, there are applications which can block them all. I’ve tried two of these, and the better of them is Ghostery. One of its delights is that it pops up a purple panel on the top-right of the browser listing all the trackers present on a given page. As a nationalist, it is very interesting to see which website owners in our own sector - in political nationalism and WN - host trackers on their site. Try it.

About your victim

One’s preferred prey has to be the journalist of whatever article we are patronising. At the DT a fair few will venture onto the threads to defend their scribblings - Daniel Hannan, Ed West, and Dan Hodges, among them. Hodges is a Blairite who has provided some good sport - not that he actually argues his case with the commentariat. But on one occasion in mid-July he had a moment of madness and penned a piece titled “You want a serious debate about immigration? Let’s have one, then”. The comment at the top of that page is mine, taking Hodges at his word. On the live thread the comment immediately beneath it was his. It read “Bollocks”, before the moderator saved his blushes and deleted it.

With a popular subject matter like that, I imagine eighty or ninety thousand readers must have perused Hodges’ piece (“Do people who claim to be concerned about immigration want a dialogue? Or do they just want to vent and rant? Because those of us who see the benefits are well up for that debate. And you know why? Because we’ll win it.”). Many must have observed his actual, execrable debating strength. It was gold.

By and large, though, it is difficult to tempt journalists into a prolonged exchange. For opinionated, wordy sorts they are oddly shy with nationalists. Usually, therefore, the choice of opponent, where we get to choose, has to be drawn from the commentariat, and at the DT that means civicist conservatives, mainstream party activists employed to troll the threads, EU activists doing the same, ditto homosexual rights activists, ditto Hasbarim, the inevitable Jews by the bucket-load, anti-racists, non-white racists, and confused post-Christians who think it is somehow moral for the English to die for diversity.

They are all grist to our mill. They all enable us to frame our arguments effectively. They are all unable to answer our questions. They are all excellent tools.

Dealing with deletions

Three iron rules:

1. Never accept moderation if the lost content was significant.

2. Maintain a note of all significant comments so that they can be re-posted after deletion.

3. Don’t re-post them in the exact same form or you will be at risk of a ban. Click on the reply button for the comment immediately above the deletion and describe the deleted post. Perhaps even speculate about why it was deleted. This works, and helps to push back the moderating boundaries.

Dealing with IP bans

If you push the envelope you will encounter a ban eventually, and serially so if you keep at it. The first step is to post a comment under a different user-name linked to another browser. If that is met by the same banning message, they may have given you an IP ban. At the DT I would now try posting on the other half of the site. The same result means that you have to do one of two things to continue posting using the same PC:

1. Change your IP address. You can force your router, if you use one, to acquire a new address, and that immediately circumvents the ban. For details google your router name + new IP address. But you will need to register a new user-name.

2. Use a proxy server like KProxy. It will cost a few dollars and can be a bit of a pain to set-up. But you will never be beaten by a ban again.

That’s it. Have a good war.