After the shooting that happened last week and the subsequent revelation that online forums may have contributed to that bowl-cut-weirdo’s radicalization and subsequent rampage, several people I know have approached me to ask what website owners with discussion boards could have done that could have prevented radicalization. There are some options, but I’ll warn you, most of them are pretty terrible and have a tendency to be easily circumvented (or to backfire spectacularly). The architecture of the internet is intended to be able to route around damage (it was designed to assist with communications after one or more nuclear strikes, after all), and censorship mimics damage in an architectural sense. So, most fixes are not particularly useful, although there are some options.

I know this is a bit outside the normal content for this blog, but since I get asked frequently, I figured I would share my method. It usually takes me an hour or two in total to build a blog post, although some of the longer ones might take as much as three hours. I do sometimes get interrupted, but for the most part, I’m able to write the whole thing without too many problems. I’ve refined the method over time to help improve my speed as well.

So, I’ve been blogging for a bit and finally got something I had hoped to receive for a while, that is, some questions from a reader. In this particular case, the reader was a friend who called to ask the questions on the phone, but I thought they were darned good ones and took notes. I think committing them here is a good idea because if one person is asking a question, it’s a good bet that others are too. Further, it’s an excellent way to generate a bit of actually useful content based on what readers actually want to know, which is often a hard thing to discover, since readers tend to stop being readers if they don’t read things that are useful to them. I didn’t quite get the exact questions down, but I got enough of a gist that I think I can answer a few. I’ve thrown in a few others as well that have come up casually in conversations with other friends, as I kept the list until I had enough items to make a post out of it. Some of these I didn’t completely answer during the conversations in question because I kind of wanted to chew on them a bit.