Under normal circumstances I’d prefer to fixate on Jose Guillen concluding KC’s weekend series in the Bronx by taking Mariano Rivera deep for a game-winner, but there’s nothing normal about the following item from NoMaas.org or the accusation contained within.
In one of his first draft blog entries, NoMaas minor league correspondent Lane Meyer received the following comment from a user named “Interested Reader”:
Interested reader Says:
June 4th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
No offense, œLane but you won™t even use your real first name on the information you provide. Yet you are presented as some sort of expert.
What credentials do you have?
It™s hard to trust anything on the internet, much less from somebody who™s pretending he™s a character in a cheesy movie. (Source)
And then a few entries later, Lane Meyer received another comment from “Interested Reader”:
Interested reader Says:
June 5th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Schooled by LoHud. Ha. (Source)
These comments sounded a little suspicious to us, so we decided to do a little bit of research. We cross-referenced the IP address used by “Interested Reader” with the IP addresses of posters on our message board (accounts are email address verified). And wouldn’t you know, our CSI:NoMaas team found a match. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the Journal News’ Peter Abraham.
We just find it highly amusing that a Yankees beat writer is fixated on a site run by a small group of fans with full-time jobs and who run NoMaas as a hobby. It’s also odd for Peter to critique our anonymity, but then post inflammatory comments under an alias.
Strangely, NoMaas hasn’t considered the possibility the comments they’ve credited to Abraham (above) were instead composed by someone else with access to the scribe’s computer. Or that the acclaimed Yankees beat writer might be a victim of that identity theft phenomena we’ve read so much about.
In any event, this is a watershed moment for NoMaas. Not only have they successfully smeared taken down a respected member of the mainstream media without granting him the courtesy of a reply, but said efforts are in stark contrast to recent news accounts of blogger burnout. Seriously, anyone who receives so few angry comments that they can take the time to cross-reference the individual I.P. addresses of such correspondents is living a pretty charmed life.
(UPDATE : Mr. Abraham writes, “As I informed NoMaas, it wasn’t me. It was somebody impersonating me. It’s happened on a few Yankees blogs. I think it’s somebody who was banned from my blog for posting assorted obscene words.”
As of noon central time Tuesday, No Maas has yet to post a retraction or an apology. Pete might well feel I should’ve quizzed him about this before running something, and that’s a fair gripe. He’s hardly inacessable. In this instance, however, I found No Maas’ efforts to “out” the Journal News writer as newsworthy if not more so than Abraham’s alleged anonymous comments.
I don’t know if a screen shot of the IP address in question would actually clear anything up — it’s not as though you can’t fake that, either. I can, however, say it is hardly unheard of someone to be impersonated in message board/comment land — it happened repeatedly on CSTB to one of this blog’s own contributors. Tracing the IP addresses, however, was useful in proving the blogger in question was being pranked).
this is especially puzzling considering that Peter Abraham gave their draft blog a mention/link in his blog this past week. My guess: He didn’t make those comments.
But then again, maybe I’m Peter Abraham. Or Nolan Maas.
I got a guy bugging me from our site who swears up and down that it wasn’t him that posted a bunch of nasty anti-Semitic comments under certain posts, that he leaves his Yahoo! account running, and people just happen to use his home computer to (and just happen to be big Kobe fans as well, also sharing his similar writing style) surreptitiously throw in the nasty remarks when he’s not looking under his own sainted name.
This man is a doctor.
I don’t give a rip when people disagree with what I write, but I do care when people I care about think that the great lot of my readership is made up of drooling homophobes who type in all caps (though I certainly concede that it might actually be that way), see nothing but dick jokes under my posts, and pass on coming back a second time.
Sorry for acting as an MSM that bitches, but some of these smaller sites have it pretty good, getting to waste time looking these things up rather than having to try to eliminate every last rape joke or oddly-scrawled curse word typed out to get in under the censor “software.”
“I got a guy bugging me from our site who swears up and down that it wasn’t him that posted a bunch of nasty anti-Semitic comments under certain posts, that he leaves his Yahoo! account running, and people just happen to use his home computer to (and just happen to be big Kobe fans as well, also sharing his similar writing style)”
I was really hoping we could just leave that misunderstanding between us. What can I tell you, i’ve got plenty of anti-semetic roommates (granted, a couple of them are dogs) and they’re nuts about Kobe. Is that so weird?
I do sympathize, however. I don’t wanna be associated with a bunch of hate fuck comments, either,but if they are actually representative of the readership, I’ve got to wonder what I’m doing to bring ’em in. I let that stuff slide for a while hoping voices of reason will eventually drown ’em out but that doesn’t always happen.
“some of these smaller sites have it pretty good, getting to waste time looking these things up rather than having to try to eliminate every last rape joke or oddly-scrawled curse word typed out to get in under the censor ‘software.'”
I think the minute you’ve got a blog with more than a handful of readers this is going to be an issue (and I’m sure it’s a pain in the ass for NoMaas, too). Far too often there are legit, halfway thoughtful comments stuck in the CSTB automatic moderation queue because the author has done something consistent with a spam poster (ie. included multiple URL’s in his comment, used the words “mortgage” or “cock extension” multiple times). I does bother me that some individuals are denied the right to reply to a CSTB post in timely matter, but manually deleting all of the spam that comes in would be a full time job. For 3 people.
It’s Pete. If you look at the mediots section of NoMaas’ message boards, Pete has his own thread and the comments made under “Pete Abraham” username is similar to how he writes on his own blog. While his blog provides unique content, he has also shown himself to be quite petty and banal at times, especially when someone calls out his obvious biases (his anti-arod, anti-girardi, pro-torre vendetta).
The only person that I could see pranking Pete would be his own IT people, the people who maintain his blog. They are the only people who have access to his IP and his email (which was in fact used to validate his email for his account on NoMaas.)
CYF,
A mere similarity between Pete’s writing for LoHud and message board posts made under his name is hardly proof of anything.
“The only person that I could see pranking Pete would be his own IT people, the people who maintain his blog. They are the only people who have access to his IP and his email (which was in fact used to validate his email for his account on NoMaas.)”
Given the level of scrutiny Abraham is under, it seems only fair for NoMaas to fully disclose the process by which this email address (presumably the same one you or I could write to Abraham at) was verified, along with the IP address they claim to have cross referenced. I’m curious it matches the IP address from Pete’s posts to CSTB’s comments.
Chances are everyone in this guy’s office shares the same IP address, because they’re all behind the same router. So he registered an account through the normal process, then someone in his office posted anonymous comments on a blog – not using said account, just coming from the same IP. Not to spoil anyone’s fun (and some people are obviously very excited about this) but that really doesn’t even get into the neighborhood of proving anything.
actually, i have it on good authority the real P.A.’s IP is not shared by a full office. Which is precisely why I’m curious what IP address NoMaas is sitting on.
The notion that the alleged comment registration was verified through Peter’s e-mail address is far more damning, but we’re not being shown any evidence of that , either.
oh please… of course it was him. He saw they oppened a blog and thought he’d take the opportunity to be the anonymous poster talking a little trash to another blog (that often slams him) for once. Pete knows he must get tons of negative comments on his posts from the nomaas guys. He is self proclaimed near clueless when it comes to the functionality/technical aspects of his blog so it’s EXTREMELY likely that he just didn’t know that they could see the ip addresses of the people posting comments. Of course he’s gonna deny it. He got caught and felt like a dope. But he’s not gonna admit to it when he always tries to be the professional in the face of the public.
on and an FYI, PA uses the word “cheesy” on his blog all the time