Raymond, I'm not sure what you're on about. I doubt anyone who is actually a moderator on the standard would have said that. Feel free to provide a link and prove me wrong.

I don't really want to get into this debate now, but The Standard has never taken the position that David is doing anything wrong on his blog. Those who read it know where he's coming from and they can read his arguments with that in mind. The issue has always been that when the media use him as a political commentator they often don't point out his ties to the Nats, and that's problematic because people think they're getting an unbiased political analysis when more often than not he's just pushing the official National Party line. Incidentally, I don't think it's David's fault, I suspect it's more to do with sloppy (or, in Larry Williams' case, biased) journalism.

<i>I don't understand why anyone lets that happen.</i>

Funny you say that Russell, we've actually just banned Dad for the second time (this time for life) for threatening other commenters, including myself (however jokingly, it's hard to tell with that guy sometimes).

We have, unfortunately, attracted a lot of nasty characters and deliberate trolls from the right to our comments section as the site's grown, and that's to be expected. To be fair there have been a couple of less than savoury characters from the left as well. I'd be interested to find out how you moderate your forum as it's increasingly becoming an issue for us.

I have commented just twice in the thread on the the issue of The Standard's lack of disclosure, with a gentle suggestion to Tane that voluntary disclosure at the time they accepted the hosting may have been desirable

Yeah, you're probably right David. A big issue here I think is lack of communication. I wasn't even aware what our new server arrangements were (other than that we had some) until I saw your post on Kiwiblog and called another standard contributor, who gave me a garbled third hand explanation down a bad phone line.

Thankfully it all turned out to be far less of an issue than I originally interpreted it to be, but I agree it's still not a good look and I probably should have taken a bigger interest in this and probably could have avoided all this mess.

I'll have a yarn with Lynn and make sure it's cleared up as soon as possible.