Real-Time Comment Analysis
The docket in numbers: how the pile of submissions was collected, deduplicated, and cleaned — volume, length, duplication, and the organized campaigns running. Sentiment lives on the analysis home; topics on Topics in Depth.
2026-08-20 – 2026-10-06 · 390,062 comments to dateHow long the comments run — a proxy for substance versus one-line form submissions.
Repetition is folded away one kind at a time, so each row is what still stands after that kind. The bottom row is the “unique comments” figure used on every page of this analysis. Repetition is detected on comments of at least 100 characters — shorter ones carry too little text to compare meaningfully.
Beyond exact duplicates, comments are grouped into campaigns — sets built from the same template, whether copied word-for-word or lightly reworded. These are the last two rows of the funnel above: 302,426 submissions folded into 819, each counted once in the “unique comments” total. Below is who is running them and how large they are.
These results are meant to be shared.
How it works. Position and topic classification is performed by a large language model (the open-weight Qwen3.8 27B) that reads each comment and labels its position — supports, opposes, or neutral — and the topics it raises. Copies and campaigns are found by hashes of the text and the overlap of six-to-eight-word phrases, grouped into text families; every unique figure counts one family once. Sentence embeddings (Qwen3) find reworded templates, shown under Organized campaigns, and cross-check the families; lexical, syntactic and stylometric features (TF-IDF, spaCy) score each comment's originality for review. Neither decides a copy count. The full method is on the Methodologies page of roadless.org.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is initiating rulemaking concerning management of inventoried roadless areas on approximately 44.7 million acres of National Forest System lands, including in Alaska. The proposed rule would rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule (2001 Roadless Rule) (66 FR 3244), which prohibits road construction, road reconstruction, and timber harvesting in inventoried roadless areas, with limited exceptions. State-specific roadless rules for Idaho and Colorado at 36 CFR 294 subparts C and D will be retained. Rescinding the 2001 Roadless Rule is intended to return decision-making for road construction, road reconstruction, and timber harvest in inventoried roadless areas to local officials, in conjunction with Forest-level land management planning. As directed by Executive Order 14153: Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential, the proposed rule will expressly exclude the Tongass National Forest from the 2001 Roadless Rule.
View the docket on regulations.gov →