dKosopedia new account creation temporarily suspended

As of a few minutes ago, I've set the dKosopedia such that no new accounts can be created. Anyone can still access and read existing articles, and existing users can still edit, but the create account function has been disabled. At least for awhile.

Why have I done this? Because of the confluence of the following:

1. YearlyKos

2. the JetBlue thing

3. my vacation

With YearlyKos coming up, and the associated JetBlue brouhaha, dKos has been, is, and will be getting a lot more drive-by traffic. Some of this drive-by traffic will be by persons with less than honorable intent, and the dKosopedia presents an easy target. Recently, in fact,...

we've had some vandalism which, while caught and reverted quickly, is, I sense, a harbinger. And my harbinger sensing is usually pretty good. (Often, vandalized pages are inadvertently amusing, such as this morning's new article "Sex" which started with "Sex is one of the best things in the world. It is something communists and environmentalists never have.")

Ordinarily, we have enough sysop types to monitor and revert in short order, and in the event we're overrun, it's easy enough to put out a call to the dKos community to help out. However, for most of the next month I'll be on vacations of various lengths of time at various places, not all of which have ready internet access. (And no, unfortunately, YearlyKos is not on the list of places I'll be, even though it's just down the street, if four hours west on the 94 can be considered down the street.)

So it just seemed easier to temporarily suspend the creation of new accounts for the dKosopedia for a while. We may lose some potential contributors by doing so, but once things are back to normal, there will be a push for new blood, a pledge drive asking for intellect instead of dollars, so to speak, and I hope we can gain those we lost.

Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause, and if you're already a dKosopedia user, please stop by and add some content.