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Comment by matt4077 | Hacker News Reader

"It is not that I am “unwilling to configure our software so that comments posted before the new policy is implemented remain under chosen screen names.” I extensively investigated that possibility and was unfortunately told by our content-management software experts that such a configuration is impossible."

Is there actually any possible CMS where this problem cannot be solved in one line of code? It's either a terrible excuse/lie or one of those examples of why I'm so happy not to be working at a large organisation wrangling ancient legacy systems.

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The guy is an absolute imbecile. He states that it is a small city where people know each other, and then immediately states that he doesn't think there will be consequences for most of his readers. He writes his own counterargument. There will be consequences for these people because it is such a small city. And he doesn't care because he thinks the only people who will be harmed are "meanies". What if your political/social/moral views differ from your parents or your wife and you don't want them to know in order to keep the peace. A simple google search on the site for your real name will take them to your comments. Those people could be genuinely curious to read what you have to write, with no il intent of "catching" you whatsoever. There will be plenty of innocent people who are harmed by this. Especially since the people that are being commented about in these articles are people who are known irl, not just names on paper. Privacy is more than about meanies on the internet, and this idiot should be fired, if only for telling the lie you quoted. Are the people of Montana to be treated like a bunch of inbred hill people who don't about these fancy city computers? His entire response was unacceptable and poorly thought out.

A quick look at their source suggests that they are using something called BLOX CMS, and their nameservers are run by TownNews, which is apparently the company behind BLOX.

BLOX is advertised as "Cloud-based" with "No hardware or software to install & maintain".

This all suggests that they actually cannot make such a change, by virtue of using an SaaS solution they have no control over.

Sure, but they could change all old accounts to use the screen name as the username, change their email address (locking them out of it) and force everyone to reregister. It's a pain in the ass but it's the only practical solution given the constraints.

But do they really need those comments on old articles? Why not just delete them? This is a community paper. How often are people reading old articles and how often are those people reading the comments? I have to question if the management of the paper are motivated more by unmasking certain shitty commenters than by anything else.

Or:

UPDATE user SET realname=screenname WHERE screenname IS NOT NULL;

Done!

It's a cloud service, I doubt they have database access.

But remind me never to ever use BLOX. This seems like the MOST basic thing you'd want to be able to do.

Doubtful, I'd 86 this feature as a PM. Way too much complexity for too little benefit.

Hardly. You'd simply just keep the status of existing posts as anonymous and any posts after turning on the feature would show the posters real name.

I understand how to make the implementation work initially, however I would tell the client no we don't support that, and then wait for them to offer an amount of money to make it worthwhile.

It's not hard, however, it complicates the software leading to subtle non-obvious bugs, and then you need to support this features with all the other features you're adding, etc.

PS. What happens when they turn if off? ...and then back on? And then the 20 other subtle bugs that this feature introduces... And how many other features that lots of customers want are we delaying while we implement this?

All this work for $24.95 a month... yeah... no, 86'd.

I'd 86 the decision to purchase your software :-)

86?

American slang term meaning "get rid of" or "remove"

They presumably have a support agreement for the CMS. They simply need to call up and say "delete all comments prior to this date"

If it's anything like most small town newspapers, there are probably about a dozen people with nothing better to do, who argue and snipe at each other in the comments section of every story, and rarely add any insight or additional newsworthy information. Just deleting them would be the safest way forward and cause no loss of anything really important.

I cannot imagine a scenario under which this code is impossible to write, but take a few layers of bureaucracy and very few people who actually dare toy with a fragile system, and you have all sorts of impossible-to-fix problems.

I remember one programmer that worked for a fairly popular newspaper telling me it was "simply impossible" to change the color of their navbar. They were on wordpress.

The news business doesn't think about their CMS that much; it's just a box for them to type into most of the time.

I can.

It's really simple too.

All you need to do is use a software package like wordpress and not employ any actual developers. CMS packages nowadays allow even large operations to run entirely on point-and-click configuration; but the kind of special case they're being asked for here would very likely require a programmer to actually write code. Note how the quoted person says "content-management software experts" and "configuration", not "developers" and "feature".

Welcome to software in the new millenium.

Well, that's fine but with any decision comes downsides. If you marry your critical business operations to inflexible software, or you refuse to employ even one developer (or maintain a contract with an external company) then you may find that down the track you cannot make important changes to your business.

Case in point: the situation detailed in this article.

My sympathy is essentially at zero level here. In this situation their privacy policy, a legal contract, guarantees they won't reveal the names of contributors even if the privacy policy changes. There is no excuse whatsoever to violate such a legal document. If they find their software cannot handle what they want to do without violating this legal contract, what this means is they cannot take the action that will violate it.

Should the MT Standard take actions to wilfully violate their privacy agreement, then they open themselves to lawsuits. In some cases I wonder if a court might grant an injunction forbidding them from implementing their new policy?

That's a very weak definition of "impossible". Even in the situation you describe you just hire a developer for a couple of hours to fix the issue.

Yes, doing this will cost you money, but it will be much, much cheaper than dealing with the inevitable shitstorm that is going to follow if they go through with this change.

Well, in the defense of your mentioned programmer, it very well might be more complicated than it looks at first glance. Having worked for two different news organizations in my past, I've an unfortunately large amount of experience with the crufty kinds of integrations that lots of newspapers use for doing everyday things like providing classified ads, e-commerce sales, etc -- it's extremely common for varying areas of the site to be served by entirely different software stacks cleverly masked in such a way to make the branding appear continuous. In the worst of those cases I worked with years ago, your only method available for changing the "header" (not HTML header, of course) involved copying/pasting HTML with manually-inlined style declarations into a text area on the partner's website.

It's probable that he or she was just simplifying things for you, and that you're just unaware of the actual underlying complexities; although changing the color on the wordpress site's navbar sounds pretty clearly trivial at first glance, the full spectrum of places to which that change would have to be manually copied might be extensive, undocumented, and tedious enough to alter that "No, that's impossible" is the go-to answer instead of spending time explaining why something sounding so trivial might actually amount to many hours of effort.

> Is there actually any possible CMS where this problem cannot be solved in one line of code?

The mistake here is assuming that the news organization has

a) a developer

b) access to the code

Quite simply, most are far too cash-strapped and rely on third-party services.

They'll be even more cash strapped when the lawsuits start rolling in. What a disaster!

No, there is no possible CMS where this is impossible. But I imagine it would take some custom configuration...e.g. a change to the database call that fetches comments to select only the username field, not the email, for articles before 2015-12-31.

Imagining the logic and code is not hard. But if you are a non-programmer, this is not how you think about things. Most people are trained to use a CMS, and every other computing interface. They don't understand that computer software can be changed. For them, hearing that it is impossible to reconfigure a CMS is like hearing that it is impossible to reconfigure a 1998 Honda Civic to become a hovercraft -- that is, it sounds completely reasonable because "that's the way these things are".

Edit: Another factor...it seems that the Standard uses a hosted CMS solution...which yeah, would pretty much make it impossible for this fix to originate in-house: http://www.townnews365.com/

At worst, couldn't they run a query to change their commenters' first names to their screen names and their last names to an empty string?

No way! He just needs a new CMS expert.

Here's one option:

  UPDATE Users SET Secret_RealName = Avatar_ChosenName WHERE 1=1

If they run that on their CMS database's Users table (with appropriate adjustments for actual column names)

They destroy the old users' real name by replacing it with their Avatar name.

This would preserve all old comments' anonimity. Active users could edit their names back to "real" if they wanted.

There's no way there's a CMS where a fix is impossible.

The result in this case might be a little unsavory but its far from the only option... Just the cheapest guaranteed one that I can think of.

Well, they don’t have database access – they use BLOX, a "website as a service" system.

It's not impossible -- but the company that maintains their website does not know how to do it and therefore told their client that it is impossible.

This is, unfortunately, not uncommon at all.

They're just another customer to that company and there's no way they're going to throw developer time to create a feature to fix a self-created crisis for a single customer. Telling them it's not possible is easier than saying that.

I usually say it will cost "this" much and then it's no longer about whether it's possible or not. I always tell my clients almost nothing is impossible, it's just a matter of time, effort, and cost.

I suspect even if it were a compiled Java binary with lost source code, this could still be solved with one line of code. Sigh.

Just to clarify, you work for the Montana Standard?

Ehh.. no. You must have misunderstood me. Or I'm misunderstanding you.

I think they don't see the quotes around the first paragraph.

Or wcummings is actually a compiler who closed the quote at the second double-quote mark, when a human would have read it as nested.

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