I have to fix this several times a week…please read and heed. I’m hoping that if I announce this as a post, it will reduce the problem.
No wordpress.com can’t fix this issue with comments, I’ve asked.
PLEASE be careful when trying to bold, italicize, link, or blockquote in comments. Just one transposed character is all it takes. Also, there’s no need to try to hyperlink URL’s, WordPress will automatically hyperlink any URL you type in like this:
OK, please note this, then burn it into your mind, slash BEFORE, not after. Thanks for your consideration – Anthony
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Mods
When I leave a comment with a link as far as I’m aware I do it correctly, but if I’m not please let me know so I can mend my ways. Thanks
Tonyb
WTF! Is this post a Joke?
This is an ‘article’ on the BEST!!!! Climate technology site worthy of comment? Interesting that We the Commenters can ‘break’ the website with a synatax typing error! I would think that some computer program with field validation or range checking rules would have solved this problem. In Teletype days it was called a rubout.
I understand the plea from the moderator. Is this site the best that the Internet technology offers? Hardley! It’s archaic! How many $ will it take to get a state of the art Internet Anthony Watts Website?
Time to move up the ladder! What will it take to move this blog into real time Internet technology?
Yes! I still have a Model 15 Teletype. It works and I can ‘smell’ it, but I have moved on to other technology!
I got a Social Security check for $1000 I’ll donate to a really good Anthony Watts website! Anyone else?
AA4SW
Must say I was delighted with this Post.
As a late and relatively senile entrant to the computer/internet world in general, I’ve often wondered about all the gimmickry which everyone else seems to understand: I have never dared to try to use it, so cannot be guilty – yet!
And now AW has given me an insight: don’t worry, I’ll try it out on a ‘commercial’ site first.
The trick I most admire at present is saying what you think, then sticking a thin line erasure through it so it can still be read.
Now, about my very dusty Function keys . . . .?
Yeah, preview would be good.
I could live without HTML in my comments, but I surely do like to suppress long, ugly link addresses. And I like blockquotes, the occasional italics, and bold from time to time. So I test it on a Blogger site I have before pasting it here.
That may bite me one day as I’m sure that WP and Blogger aren’t congruent in how they handle HTML, *and* Blogger’s preview isn’t as WYSIWYG as it claims to be.
Anthony,
The need for embedded hyperlinks is that it makes things a lot more readable.
There is a WordPress plugin to help your users with this and more which I’ve installed on WordPress blogs in the past but unfortunately your particular WordPress host doesn’t allow you to install this or anything like it that I could find.
Eric Ellison says:
March 20, 2011 at 3:28 pm
“Time to move up the ladder! What will it take to move this blog into real time Internet technology?”
Actually WordPress is hosted on a cloud server which is generally considered to be cutting edge stuff. In reality the cutting edginess is economic in nature rather than nifty new usability features. One restriction is that customizing WordPress with plugins on a blog by blog basis is prohibitively difficult. Another restriction is that the blog owner has no access to IP addresses of commenters which is sometimes a very valuable anti-troll tool.
@Anthony
I’m still amazed at the great troll control here. It must be a lot of work. I had an X-Panel so I could use IP blocks on the server and also modify the WordPress php source code to reduce the workload in various ways but moderation was still time consuming on a controversial blog with many thousands of unique visitors every month and unlike here I had registration turned on too! A couple of trolls discovered the trick of using a dial-up modem (dynamic IP) to defeat IP blocks. If you block the IP address of such a troll all they have to do is hang-up the dial-up connection and re-dial (takes about 30 seconds) and they get a different IP address on reconnection. The counter-move for that was for me to block the entire range of IP addresses of the phone-bank they were using. There was a very remote chance I’d block legitimate users of that phone-bank but so few people use old fashioned dial-up modems anymore I thought it worth the risk. Another problem I had was administrative access control. I didn’t care for the access selections given to different user-levels as it allowed editors to monkey around with the blacklist and there was no audit trail so I couldn’t find out who among a number of editors was doing things I didn’t want done so I got into the WordPress source code and restricted access to the blacklist to top level administrators.
Having access to IP addresses in general is very handy and you lose that in a cloud. For instance if you have someone claiming to be a professor at UCLA but all his comments are originating from a phone bank in Possum Trot, Kentucky it’s pretty unlikely the claim is true. On the other hand I busted more than one liberal professor pretending to be someone else by googling his IP address and finding it associated with his real university email address in some server log or another that google’s web crawler stumbled across and indexed. It was quite fun playing Dick Tracy on the internet. Amazing what’s out there if you know what to look for and how to look for it.
mikemUK says:
March 20, 2011 at 4:06 pm
“The trick I most admire at present is saying what you think, then sticking a thin line erasure through it so it can still be read.”
Yeah, that’s a very
gayclever embellishment to be sure!An easy approach to getting open&close tags in place fur shur is to type both before entering the contents. E.g. <i></i> after typing the content becomes <i>content</i> on the entry page and content on the display page.
Ed Dahlgren;
tinyurl.com has a feature called “Custom alias”, so one can put a descriptive title instead of the alphanumeric index. E.g.:
http://tinyurl.com/Zombie-Brains-Memo
😉
These limitations by wordpress really surprise me. It is sooooo easy to solve. I am almost a newby in web page programming and it took me just 20 minutes investigation and about 10 lines of code to learn and implement how to disable any html tags introduced in user comments in my web page (1 single line of php code), and then enable the bbcodes [b][/b], [i][/i] for bold and italics (two lines of code each) with automatic closing of any of those which could be still open by the end of the comment (a few extra lines). Sooooooooo simple. Other html tags with parameters such as the one for hyperlinks are just marginally more complicated.
Just testing the Italian, or something like that. A bold new adventure.
It’s the Sun dammit , hee, hee. Scepticalscience.com keeps getting it wrong in so many ways. It’s turning into a slow train wreck.
It’s the Sun dammit, hee, hee. Scepticalscience.com keeps getting it wrong in so many ways. It’s turning into a slow train wreck. Recheck.
OK, underline not working.
You can test it by opening a text file in notepad or equivilent basic text editor. Save the file as “filename.html” and then open it up in a browser.
A proper html file should have a the correct doctype declaration, a head and body etc. but for the purpose of testing simple text formatting, you don’t need to do this.
underline
OK, I guess I don’t know how to do the clever html stuff here, should be simple though, underline, strikethrough, etc.
Well I’m from the old school; the do-it-yourself KISS school.
So my limit of fanciness goes thus:_ “”””” cut and paste what you said “””””
So that’s five spaces, then five double quotes, then five spaces, then what I cut and pasted from whoever’s name is at the beginning, and then five spaces, and five more quotes, and five more end spaces just for good measure. And sometimes I will expunge some of what I cut and pasted, so you don’t have to read through five pages you already read, to get to the punch line. Forgive me if I sometimes forget to put in some …… to indicate my deletions.
Yes you won’t find this in any English Grammar book and Dr Richard Lederer; father of Poker Player extra-ordinaire Howard Lederer, and his equally dangerous sister Annie Duke; Donald Trump girlfriend (Joan B. Rivers) trumper supreme; and the world’s greatest authority on the English Language; would never condone it, in any of his 535 books on English; but I use it anyway; so you know it’s really me.
Two Words: Rich Text Editor
Haven’t I seen WP blogs that use a javascript-based edit box (usually called a “rich text editor”) like the ones provided in most forum input windows? That keeps things rolling along nicely for many a website.
(It’s a Joe Biden joke)
thepoodlebites says:
March 21, 2011 at 7:26 am
Check the bottom part of my guide to WUWT, linked to above or go now to http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wuwt/index.html . I tried to organize things by most useful/popular first.
It’s the Sun
dammit, hee, hee. Scepticalscience.com keeps getting it wrong in so many ways. It’s turning into a slow train wreck. It really is the Sun and PDO, not CO2 induced CAGW. It’s natural climate variability.People trying to do underlines and stuff should just read the light grey text below the Comment box. That’s all she wrote. <del>
and<strike>producethe same effects.The CAAssistant script using GreaseMonkey puts others at the top of the Comment box, but not all work. Underline is one of the non-functional ones, I think it does a paragraph break. Etc.
Nope, it does nothing. Superscript O2 and subscript CO2 are there, too.
But they don’t work either!
So it’s just the ones listed below the box.