Could you be more specific? I poked around the blog, and all I could find were long strings of personal messages that read like our Community board on a good day. And I'm a bit unclear on the concept of an unmoderated site whose operators are frantically trying to clean it up--seems a bit paradoxical to me. Maybe it's just the Zone, but the cleanup-on-aisle-9 thing is what moderators do.

It does seem naive to not moderate public comments, if that is in fact the case. OTOH, transparency is a minor but distinctive theme of the Obama campaign, and maybe the naivete was based on idealism about freedom of speech. Their thinking might have been that the typical spittle-flying RightWing rant posted on their site would only discredit the Right and help Obama, and maybe they didn't consider the problem of ringers trying to discredit them.

Open directories are the result of a server misconfiguration, and that's considered quite bad form among WebMasters. Here's something odd: Their Web server identifies itself as "PWS", which is Microsoft's Personal Web Server--a chopped-and-lowered version of their real server, IIS. WTF? That's a toy used by Web developers to test sites. Makes no sense at all, because PWS couldn't handle the load of a real public Web site. It also makes the open directory problem harder to understand, because IIS/PWS allow the prohibition to be set once, globally for an entire site. It's the Apache Web server that's easier to misconfigure in that regard because the configuration is on a per-directory basis.

I wonder if they're under cyberattack from the RNC? I know that sounds far-fetched, but then, the problems you're describing are in some ways far-fetched too. You want to believe incompetency, but there may be another explanation.