Totally agree with Lamb.

We've been doing a few things that should help a lot with spam diaries:

1) Banning IP addresses of diarists who write them
2) Instituted a 4-day waiting period after signing up, before one can write a diary.

The first one will let us slowly but surely weed out troublemakers when they emerge, while the second will frankly make it a pain in the ass for spammers to post here in the first place (their practice is pretty much to register and spam right away).

Spam comments will still show up, and we don't want to institute a delay for comments just yet.  But these too should taper off (and in the meantime, be hidden quickly by users with that power).

I worked with U2 on the Joshua Tree tour. Great bunch of guys, and an incredible band!  

We're constrained now in how we can present them, but would love to eventually get to something where the top ones could be surfaced to the top.  

There's a drop down that lets you use it.  Ain't perfect, but easier than the html.

Then again... you might be using this already, and... still think it's lame.   :)

If it's the latter, yeah, I think there's definitely room for improvement.  I'll see what the SoapBlox folks are up to (the ones who make the software we use).  It's a great platform overall (certainly for the price), but... there's room for improvement, no doubt.

I'll bite!!

Will there be actual cattle prods involved?  All that jiggling would be fascinating, and trippy as hell.  I'm game.  Is LEFTAKE picking up travel costs?

Now, while I am not one to overdue the criticism, I must admit to a couple of problems with the obese.

Sorry but here I go there.  I have one niece 20 years of age, who is destined to the severe obesity as she grows older.  I feel sorry for her.  I have to sit a special chair in my family room when she visits, or purchase more sofas and love seats (NAUGHT).  The chair is now malfunctioning.  I have chair leg pads on the bottom of my kitchen table chairs, she sit once and popped two cushions right from under the legs.  

More relevant story.  During a flight to Hawaii (one of a few), the wife and I had the overwhelming displeasure of sitting next to a person (gender is not worthy of mention) who was morbidly obese.  The passenger sit next to the wife and spread 3/5's into my wife's seat. The wife, then was forced to spread and equal number of 'fifths' into my seat (as she has wide shoulders but no overweight in any sense).  The wife had back strain uncomfort for three days after arrival at OAHU.  The flight was filled to the brim, could not change seats.

WAIT, WAIT,....guess what. THE RETURN FLIGHT...same person, same story.

I am not one to poke fun at people but when the uncomfort spread to an 8 hour non-stop flight, that is too much to take.

But, I will not hammer the obese.

If I have offended anyone, I want to apologize in advance.

If this can be done I think it would be very cool.

http://www.html-reference.com/ has all of the tags you may need, but for embedding video I am usually too lazy to figure out all of the parameters, so I just copy the embedded link from Youtube or Comedy Central, etc.

Thus for an image, you would type  
<IMG SRC="image file link here" width="number of pixels or a percentage" height="number of pixels or a percentage">

You can wrap a hyperlink around it, and specify a new page for opening the link if you wish.  You can also put data into a table, etc.  All just depends upon how familiar you are with HTML coding. But the final product could look something like this:

<a href="http:\www.leftake.com" target="_blank"><img src="/upload/images/v2/LefTakeHeaderLogo.png"></a>

They're just words.  And I don't buy this argument that the use of  profanity suggests an inferior or lazy mind.  Rather, I'd suggest that the fear and/or distain of four-letter words suggests a certain level of intellectual and emotional repression representative of the pervasive ignorance in our society.  If we pretend hard enough, the word "retard" won't exist.  Words have an amazing power.  If saying "fuck" can get people to at least stop and think for a moment, then the old F-Bomb is doing its' job.  Think about that the next time you hit yourself in the thumb with a hammer.  Also:  Lighten the fuck up.

and I have to agree that profanity doesn't add to the site.  I find all of the shock-jock tactics and the chest-thumping to be tiresome and immature and when people engage in it, I find myself sighing and wondering why they don't feel their points or arguments can stand on their own.  If you have something intelligent to say I'm happy to read it, but I really don't understand the need to include slurs and profanity.  In my opinion, it dumbs things down, and I fail to see how that's a good thing.  Joking around is great, but it would be nice if this site was populated with people who debate maturely and effectively, or understand how true debate works at all, instead of reducing things to personal attacks and judgmental hyperbole.  It's really easy to do that online.  Maybe thinking about how one would communicate in person would be helpful?  I don't know.  I just felt the need to speak up and say that the profanity and shock-jock tactics bother me too.

....I enjoying visiting the LEFTAKE.  It offers opportunity that is vastly different from a place where I formerly hung-out.  That place became a place for people to clique together and horde the place while bullying and putting down people with opposite views. So, I left that place when someone turned-me-on the the LEFTAKE. I read the dairy about 'almost 10,000 TAKERs' and also noticed that not very many of that number actually post diaries or post-up comments.

I have only been visiting since Feb. 24, 2010.  I thoroughly enjoy the visits but I like SUZE feel th absence of diaries is a little disappointing.  Of course, I have not posted a dairy in quite sometime, so I will slip my hypocrite 'collar' on for a few minutes.

The dairies are very informative to me. The dialog subsequent to the diaries is even more interesting.

So, I am agreeing with SUZE.  

Let's see pick-it up.