[dayglored]

> Our experience with the mysterious, vanishing traffic spike of January 31 may indicate that liberal Internet gatekeepers have found a way to curtail FreeRepublic's influence -- and the influence of conservative Web sites generally.

Geez, what a pile of foolishness. I sure wish, before folks posted internet-based conspiracy threads, that they would learn a little about how the internet works.

1. It's not a regulated, consistent service like your 120VAC wall outlet power. It has fluctuations, sometimes big ones. Sometimes there are breakdowns, delays, hangs, confusion.

2. DNS (domain name resolution) can have huge effects on availability of any given website or range, and DNS fluctuates also. Sometimes wildly. A DNS failure in one place can appear to take a website in another place off the internet for hours or even days until it straightens out.

3. The internet was designed to route around temporary outages or severe damage. Sometimes it takes it a little while to do so; sometimes it can't. Sometimes the re-routing is less than optimal.

4. Sometimes it's your own browser, your own computer, your own ISP, or your ISP's connection to a backbone. It's not always the black freakin' helicopters.

5. Network diagnostics and bencmarks often mislead or lie outright. Things change, morph, recover, break again.

6. The answer is more dependent on how you ask the question than on the actual situation. And the situation varies, sometimes wildly.

7. Internet "gatekeepers", liberal or otherwise, are your imagination working overtime. Maybe in their dreams, yeah; but the reality is that only local gatekeeping (like your ISP limiting your pipe) is likely to function as expected.

8. The only practical way to block a site is to filter its packets out of the data stream. Doing so at the level of the general internet is impossible, because as noted above, the internet was designed to route around damage. It views blocking (and similar censorship) as "damage" and routes around it. Only if there is no other pathway, does it fail to automatically "fix" the problem.

You get the idea?

Sheesh. Calm down.

[dayglored]

I should perhaps add:

If your concern is that "liberal gatekeepers" are somehow "limiting the influence" of FreeRepublic by manipulating survey results, well... who cares?

The only thing that really counts is access, which is what I addressed above.

I, and most other like-minded conservatives and libertarians, don't pay attention to internet surveys. Surveys are untrustworthy even at their best.

We hit the websites we want to hit, which only requires internet access. If -that- gets blocked, we have a complaint.

[Richard Poe]

dayglored writes: Sometimes it's your own browser, your own computer, your own ISP, or your ISP's connection to a backbone. It's not always the black freakin' helicopters.

I'm afraid that your comments do not speak to the point.

Let me repeat that WordPress Stats showed between 326 to 413 Freepers visiting BadEagle.com on January 31, while Google Analytics showed none.

Please explain to me how and why this might have occurred. And please be specific. Give me an actual theory which can be put to the test -- that is, a concrete, technical scenario which might conceivably have yielded this result.

I will then consider your theory, and let you know whether or not it fits the circumstances of this particular case. If it does not fit the circumstances of this particular case, I will then invite you to propose an alternate theory.

This sort of discussion would be far more productive, I think, than breezy dismissals of "black helicopters", "conspiracy theories" and the like.