For months, we’ve been documenting the quietly fought battle between The Boiler Room and Johnson over the secrets hidden in the LGF archives. For all intents and purposes, this battle is over, and we possess the content of the memory-holed material, as well as the locations of missing and duplicate comments. It was a long struggle, but even if Charles tried to fight back by blocking the wayback machine and Google cache, banning multiple socks, and even“outing” netizens, we’d remained one step ahead. As a result, we’ve been able to feature a series of “rescued” threads and comments from the archives.
Another tactic that CJ implemented in an attempt to thwart our efforts was to hide the comments sections of the older articles (pre-2008) from unregistered visitors. Since wepointed it out back in November, Johnson has periodically switched them from hidden to unhidden, and then back again. We presume that this was a tactic employed in an effort to “mud the waters” and add ambiguity to the issue, while making more difficult for us to use the old comments and pin down any kind of accusation.
For a while, the switch would happen every week or two, and it usually coincided with something that was posted on our side. To wit, I’m pretty sure that ChenZhen was responsible for the last switch to “hidden”, with this taunting tweet:
upcoming #LGF memory hole exposes: articles 16966, 18143, 19208, and 19837. but 1st 11697 tomorrow. see: http://tinyurl.com/42zxzxx—
(@ChenZhen) April 30, 2011
As you can see from the timestamp, that was over two months ago, so perhaps we should say something. Or, if this is permanent, it is probably worth a notation for the LGF entry on wikipedia.
If the latter, we should say that, for the record, the current cutoff for hidden/unhidden comments in the LGF archives is as follows:
31778_Pope_Benedict_Meets_Stephen_Hawking_Sans_Creationists (comments off)
31779_Overnight_Open_Thread (comments on)
The cutoff is on Nov. 1 2008. (Or, a few days before the election of Barack Obama.)
The first visible comment for unregistered visitors is 6147884, which means that there are ~6,112,289 comments hidden in total (6147884 – 35595 = 6,112,289; unlike CJ, we won’t count the duplicates).
