The initial comments following my previous post were mostly civil, but then today several of them turned sour. Thus I have been forced to remove the commenting feature from ILN until we can implement a moderated one. I thank the many commenters who offered their advice, but this recent spat of negative comments has made my responsibility all too clear.

The offending commenters seem to share one common fallacy--namely, the mistaken idea that using personal attacks and immaturity will counteract other such acts, or even positively move one's own agenda.

I should also clarify a couple other matters. First, Professor Bradford apologized for his prior misuse of the blog comments and admitted to such. Other commenters have made personal attacks against him and others, yet they are too small to apologize or to lift their mask of anonymity, and I can assure you that if I had a way to identify them, I would.

The most egregious example was a commenter under the name of "Safety First" who claimed that Bradford had made physical threats under the comments. I cannot stress too strongly that this claim is patently untrue.

Finally, there is one more matter I should mention. A captain from the IUPUI campus police contacted me on Friday. Her e-mail to me included her signature saying that she was a captain in the IUPUI police.

I called her, and she asked several questions about the technology of IP addresses and how I "could be sure" of the identity of a commenter, by using the IP address. I told her that I could not be certain. I then asked her if this questioning was part of a police investigation, because if it was, I would need to determine my obligations.

She answered that it was not for an investigation and that she was just personally curious. I do not believe that, as it simply does not make sense. I suspect she was asked to question me, in order to discover a possibility of digging up dirt on somebody. Perhaps the use of her position in the police was thought to intimidate me into giving more information.

Obviously this is reasoned conjecture, but if it is indeed true, I implore the party or parties seeking information to use ethical and honest channels rather than underhanded methods such as this.