Last week was a busy one! Spec’s editorial board endorsed candidates for Columbia College Student Council and General Studies Student Council. We’ve tried to outline beforehow the editorial board—to be distinguished from the managing board (the newspaper’s editors)—arrive at the final argument each issue. But readers may like to know that for student government elections, we have a bit of a special process. When writing an editorial, we usually have one boardmember make phone calls, do some reporting and fact-checking, etc. For the elections, though, we interview all the candidates, grill them on policy views, and then try to reach a consensus. Sometimes, that consensus is easily achieved. Other times, it takes more research, discussion amongst the board, and sometimes a formal vote. The eventual editorial then tries to accurately represent the board’s full view—not only in the choice of the candidate, but in acknowledging the pros and cons regarding each, as well as commenting on the issues themselves regardless of whom we endorse.

Endorsing can be difficult. If two candidates seem similar, should we really choose between one or the other, and how so? As we noted in this editorial, we sometimes feel a lack of faith in the council elections. Ultimately, we opt to endorse because, especially if two candidates are similar, an editorial can help us and potential readers distinguish the subtler differences between them. With that as a mission, in the end…endorsing can just be difficult.

An unrelated note: Commenting has returned! However, we had some slip-ups. The new commenting policy will use a security question system to help keep out spam (the original reason we took commenting down). But the new system in our first week turned out to be a bit too sensitive, so some comments that initially were accepted somehow were lost. Since a few of these were about a contentious opinion submission on Tibet, a few readers wrote in asking why their (critical) comments had been removed. We apologize but it was unintentional. The piece, incidentally, was written based on faulty information, and we formally retracted it, removing it from the Web site and issuing a note of explanation.

Comments should, now, remain published once they pass our anti-spam system. So comment away, and thanks for bearing with us.

The online edition of the Spectator will now see commenting on all of its articles once more. 

We made the decision to remove article commenting at the end of the Fall 2007 semester due to severe SPAM attacks on our website. Unfortunately, due to restraints within the online section and the complexity of our Drupal content management system, we were not able to address the issue until recently. However, we now have strong anti-SPAM systems in place along with new controls against anonymous commenting. All commenters must now answer a security question which — ideally — will only be answerable by humans. We’re currently in our test week, so there still may be many wrinkles to iron out.

Here’s a bit from our web developer as well:

After days looking at the archives, I think it’s wise to ban all comments with “Cool site”, “Good site”, “Nice site” and “* syte [sic]”. Of note, however, is that because 30% of the SPAM was actually gibberish without any links or advertisements, I’m led to believe your site was actually attacked without aim for commercial gain. This differs from the rest of your SPAM, that while malignant, has a commercial aspects besides just causing harm. Most of this purely malignant SPAM was posted on 1/17/2008…

Comment away!