L’affaire Violet Blue has now produced nearly 1200 comments on the relevant Boing Boing page. The controversy comes from Boing Boing’s having deleted 100 or so posts from its archive linking to, discussing or written by Blue, a sex columnist from San Francisco.

After a couple of days of increasingly bad publicity, the site published a justification hinting at some unspecified “behavior” on Blue’s part that prompted the deletions, which the site kept referring to as “unpublishing.” But the editors went no further, saying, “We hope you’ll respect our choice to keep the reasons behind this private.”

The deletions, which were apparently carried out a year ago but just came to notice, seemed weird because of the vituperative nature of the act and the overtones of rewriting or erasing history, and because the site has often written about openness and transparency on the web.

The Boing Boing debate on the act is here. (Be forewarned—the comments are exhausting to read.)

There’s a fairly good detailing of the relevant issues here, on a site called ZenArchery.

Hitsville finds the debate interesting for several reasons. First, it’s odd to see such a quintessentially new media operation behave in such an old-school way. Second, it’s odd to see such a quintessentially new media operation think it could actually keep the matter private once Blue had become a cause célèbre.

And three, the various posited explanations for the banishment range from the factitiously political to the saucily personal. They are:

1) That Blue filed a trademark lawsuit against a porn star who used the same name, and that this ran afoul of the site’s positions on copyright law.

2) That Blue’s writing about quondam Rocketboom newsgal Amanda Cogden got Cogden in some sort of trouble and that this pissed off the Boing Boingers.  (Blue’s article is here.)

3) That Blue had a personal relationship with one of the site’s editors. (Details on that here.)

1) and 2) seem unlikely explanations because they are the sort of political issues that would best be handled out in the open and don’t really involve “behavior.” Boing Boing could take Cogden’s side, or the porn star’s side, and that would be that.

That leaves 3), which might explain why the site said it wanted to keep the matter “private.” Mitigating against that explanation is this comment from Blue, posted on her own blog:

[N]o one has told me what the disagreement is, or was, or how I behaved to incur such extreme behavior from BB. I have no clue. maybe someone told them something untrue about me and they believed it, without asking me if it was true or not. maybe it’s a personal grievance and the person holding the grudge couldn’t come clean with me about it. but, mostly, I just keep thinking that if I had done something wrong or truly evil and had been told about it, I could have at least apologized or something.

One assumes that if a personal affair had been in the mix Blue would have at least mentioned this. (If not, it will be clear Blue was being extremely disingenuous in her protestations that she had no clue.) Also possibly mitigating against 3) is that fact that, since Boing Boing is a very popular site, and since links to Blue from it is a valuable resource for her, a deliberate plan to punish her would include a) no further links and b) the silent treatment but not c) the “unpublishing” of all mentions of her, because that would plainly be something that would call attention to Blue.

… all of which leads me to reason 4), which I want to call a quartum quid, but technically isn’t, because it’s not something that involves a little bit of each of the other possible explanations but is, instead, something no one’s come up with yet. Whatever it is has to explain why the Boing Boing editors so exercised.

One editor, as I wrote earlier, compared the links to Blue’s work as “piles of shit lying around on the floor.” That comment was later altered by the editor who posted it; that act, and several other similar ones, has created a chorus of complaint on the site’s comments page devoted to the issue. Here’s one of the better attacks on this count, from a poster called “ErosBacchus”; I’m not going to bother to ID the various names he or she drops:

To review:About a year ago, BB altered their site, removing all old articles/links, etc that made any reference to Violet Blue. They did this covertly, without telling anyone, and without even leaving any kind of indicator that content had been removed.

When it came to light, Teresa finally posted something about it. When people started criticizing her seeming comparison of the posts about Violet to “piles of shit”, she went back and quietly edited her post, removing those bits, without any indication that she had done so, and without any response to the few people who caught the change.

During the ensuing discussion Xeni pointed to their policy, without revealing that she was pointing to a brand new version of this policy, one that had been quietly altered just recently in direct response to this incident.

When that fact was brought to light, she posted a response to the critic who pointed it out. […] Within a matter of minutes, she went back and altered that post, again without indicating it had been changed.

Summary: Xeni made a retroactive, secret alteration to her comment that was discussing the retroactive, secret alteration of a BB policy that was brought up in the comments thread of a secretly, retroactively altered TNH post that discussed the secret, retroactive alteration of the site to remove any and all content relating to Violet Blue.

Two things I don’t understand: One, why Boing Boing, rather than exhibiting the stress on display on the comments page, is not just reveling in the attention, breaking the comments page up to generate more page views, and so forth. And two, while at this point several of the Boing Boing editors are in the mix posting comments themselves, I don’t think anyone has asked if the editor in question did have a relationship with Blue. What sort of delicacy is that?