Is the Times hiding negative comments about its Nightjack story? 0
Blogs and comments have been fairly negative after the Times unmasked Nightjack, the no-longer-anonymous police blogger - none more so than on the Times's own blog defending the story.
The word 'next' has gone missing, leaving a weird blob - making it look like there are no other comments.
Comments of condemnation seemed to stop at 10.51am today.
But there is a page of other comments (so there are 122 in total at 8pm thursday) - they're just very hard to find as the 'next' link to later comments has vanished.
Conspiracy theory
The Times runs its blogs using Typepad.
When there are enough comments, this implementation paginates them. So when the page gets too long, you see the word next and the >> symbol.
With the word 'next'
For instance, this post and this post do this.
On the post with the Nightjack comments, the word next disappears as the screenshot above shows.
There's just the tiny >> symbol - it's very hard to realise that this is a link to see more comments.
On the one hand, I'm sure the Times don't have a button that allows them to configure that level of detail in their version of Typepad.
On the other hand, how come the word next is missing, giving the impression there are far fewer comments than there are?
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