You may have already noticed that commenting is faster. That’s because whitelisting is now enabled. Of course the usual banned words and blacklisted commenter memes will go straight to the nether regions as before. Some comments that are questionable, and require the attention of a moderator will get held for review, but for 99% of people making comments, you’ll see an immediate speed improvement. After a million comments the hard way, it is time to work smarter. This is a win-win for the readers as well as the moderation staff, and particularly for me.
And, there are other improvements coming.
For example, “Tips and Notes” is going to disappear, to be replaced by a better system. This better system will include the ability for more of our readers to submit stories that make it to the front page. Again, this is to improve the speed and lessen the behind the scenes labor. WUWT has gotten so big, that it is a struggle to manage its upkeep now, so the solution is a smarter story management and comment submission system.
Stay tuned for more details, and in the meantime I welcome suggestions. Many of the changes will be implemented this coming weekend, and I’ll have a second post describing how to make the most of them.
In the meantime if you see inappropriate comments, drop us a note in the contact section of the header menu. There may be some tweaking we still need to do, but after years of this I think we have it tuned where spam and inappropriate comments are acted upon properly.
Note: No we can’t provide a comment system that allows you to edit your comments after they are submitted. That’s a feature wordpress.com won’t allow due to it being what they deem a security risk for code injection, even though it is often requested by WUWT and other blogs.
As always, my sincere thanks to everyone in this community that helps make WUWT successful from the readers, to the moderators, to the story tipsters – all of you are part of the success.
The World’s Best Science Site just gets better and better. It’s all thanks to Anthony’s hard work and the dedication of the team that assists him. To judge by the time, effort and work involved in running the site, Anthony must have secretly invented a time expander.
Kitler – 07:55
If we can educate the rest of the (mainly) English speaking world with the rich diversity that is Viz’ Profanisaurus, the world will be a better place. “A strong appeal there by the Australians” – now how many non Viz readers would have a clue what that sentence actually referred to?
Fnar Fnar.
p.s. I bet 8 ACE reads WUWT.
TFN Johnson says:
April 10, 2013 at 11:27 pm
Just get rid of the comment facility. It puts off a lot of people by its sanctimonious tone, and rarely adds anything of value. Even Leif is becoming predictable.
Better than showing unpredictable behavior one would think….
Great work, Anthony!
Could you please display a list of the banned words. At present the “policy” page mentions that some words are banned but does not say which ones. Also perhaps – banned practices. Just so we know.
Thanks.
Threading destroys debate.
The original positions on an article take least account of the opposing views as the opposing views haven’t been heard yet.
And yet the original positions are the first that arrive.
So then someone new turns up and they respond to the top comments, and that drags the debate back to the beginning again.
And any nuance is lost as the original commenters have to go back to clarify their meanings, lest they are misrepresented.
That is the best case.
The worst case is deliberate steering of the early comments by repeated pressure on to a slightly different topic.
Threading leads to polarised and simplistic positions.
This is good news. Is it possible to incorporate a sequential numbering system for each comment to enable us to refer back to particular comments when there are many to be read? Also, it would be nice if the country of origin of the commenter is automatically built in to the details of the commenter at the top of the comment.
Best riposte ever:
lsvalgaard says: Better than showing unpredictable behavior one would think….
To get back to a particular comment I just make a note of the date and time it was submitted.
TFN Johnson says:
April 10, 2013 at 11:27 pm
Just get rid of the comment facility. It puts off a lot of people by its sanctimonious tone, and rarely adds anything of value. Even Lief is becoming predictable.
I assume you are being ironic. A blog without comments is not a blog anymore, just an online newspaper – and even these now have blogs attached.
Much of the point of blogging is letting off steam and this can involve on occasions appearing to some as sanctimonious and even obnoxious. Blogs need relaxed editing (WUWT excels at this) to include good, bad and ugly with only extreme stuff removed – so just learn to take the rough with the smooth. Also having people like Leif in the blog reminds us that we are not always as smart as we like to think we are.
StephenP:
re your comment at April 11, 2013 at 2:50 am. I don’t bother to take notes in case I need to find a particular comment.
To get back to a particular comment I just press ctrl-f then type in a key word (possibly a name). Then, each press of the ‘enter’ key takes me to each successive use of the key word on the page. It rarely takes more than 2 seconds to find the particular comment.
If I cannot remember a key word then there is no need for me to seek a previous particular comment.
However, having comments numbered would assist finding referenced comments. Pressing ctrl-f and typing the number would be fast.
Richard
Can we have a page end button for this of those of us with iPads? Takes quite awhile to scroll to bottom of tips and notes and long threads. Ta.
Anthony, you give us a say and you now provide a platform to spread the word on your TV program and advertise and spread the word here – absolutely remarkable, and so much appreciated when so many lies and disinformation is spread by the other side. You go from strength to strength.
Stunningly closely correlated graphs between “solar geomagnetic activity” (not just sunspot activity) and temperature at: http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/paper-finds-solar-influence-on-climate.html OVER A 140 YEAR TIME PERIOD. Please look into this…..
Future Improvements?
I would like to have a Reference Page on the physics of the postulated CO2-warming-effect.
I know this issue runs through a lot of the discussions, but it would be nice to have all the data and arguments in one place.
A few questions that I would like to be dealt with:
– Satellite images in the 15 micron band (as far back as possible, any visible changes?)
– Discussion of opaqueness vs blocking vs back radiation (How opaque to LW radiation is the stratosphere compared to the troposphere?)
– CO2 column: at what height above ground do we have 50% of CO2? (50% of CO2 in the troposphere?)
– How much back radiation at top of the troposphere is attributed to CO2 (30%?)
– At what distance through the atmosphere (at different heights) do we have 50% or 90% of LW radiation absorbed?
– Is CO2 warming due to LW radiation – or is it reemitting without temperature change.
– What is a good classroom experiment? (Isn’t the stratosphere predicted to get cooler, why than showing warmer CO2 in a glass jar?)
– and 50 more questions like that…
What do you think?
(The warmist sites usually don’t go into detail and mostly use – questionable – analogies.)
Anthony Watts says:
April 10, 2013 at 4:16 pm
@hedgingcontrarianism Yes it had something to do with that twitter post. Can’t say for a long while but it was a huge shock…so time to work smarter.
Probably no-ones business but yours. Thus some Twitter element. If so, please ignore. Or ignore for any reason.
However its hard to hear of a “huge shock” which has occasioned changes to WUWT without thinking that this might be a negative development. Is there some threat or imposition to/on WUWT or you? If so, there seems to be something of an army out here.
As I said, ignore at your leisure and pleasure.
Nice upgrades! And a well-deserved break for the moderators.
I agree with those who don’t want to see threaded comments. Too easy to get lost.
Also, immediate appearance of comments is great, but does run the risk of two people monopolizing the discussion with back-and-forth sniping comments 30 seconds apart.
Donald L Klipstein says:
April 10, 2013 at 5:52 pm
……………….Anthony Watts even mentions some of these words and phrases. If he
can decry or despute “consensus”, use in debate phrases using the word
“deniers”, and a moderator can mention lack of one cent from “Big Oil”,
then such words and phrases are fair play.
—————————————
Donald, I’ll keep it in mind when I visit your blog.
I believe this is Anthony’s football and we play by Anthony’s rules.
tyvm
cn
I learn as much from the comments as I do from the content, sometimes more, depending on the original post. However, due to the volume of comments, keeping up is impossible and I doubt many try. I do fear that the lack of moderation being introduced will substantially increase the volume of comments, without necessarily increasing the ‘learning’ available in them. We should never fear necessary change, but as we in newspapers have learned, not all change is for the better, in the end. Anthony, your blog is an outstanding resource. When confronted by underinformed obstinance, WUWT is the FIRST place where I send people who are willing to learn. I will be watching with interest, and just a tiny bit of concern. All the best!
I’m told that many organisations in Scunthorpe have problems similar to majormike1.
Keep up the good work.
George Lawson says: “This is good news. Is it possible to incorporate a sequential numbering system for each comment”
Yes, this is such a good idea. Although I would suggest a fixed digit system starting with 000.. although for such a system we would need to know the maximum possible number of comments. Realistically, 100 comments a day per person would give us 35600 comments a year which with a 6digit comment number wouldn’t run out even for 28 years of such commenting.
However, I think we need to make the comment system future proof. And who knows what will be happening in 28 years … with our subaqua culture 100s of meters under the frozen sea caused by global warming. So, what happens if we start having automatated comment systems to post our comments for us?? You didn’t think about that! And what if we introduced revisions to comments? So I propose the following numbering system:
YYYYMMDDHHSSRRRSSSS
Where RRRR is the revision number of the comment and SSSS is the subcomment of the comment.
But hey! … how do we know whether the commenter is who they really are? Easy!! We included a public key encryption system. This would a 32 character key added to the above. Obviously we would also need to specify the encoding mechanism because you can;t start mixing UTF-8, with UTF-16 because of the varying endianness.
So I suggest we have comment numbering in the following format:
YYYYMMDDHHSSRRRSSSSabcefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEF using UTF-8
In addition I have a range of suggested specifications for poster names,.(surname [;} forenames (optional titles) ..,. although I suggest where name ordering is culturally sensitive we allow the option to reverse this. Also we should definitely move to YYYYMMDD because of the inability of the US to understand that the proper format for dates is DDMMYYYY
In addition, I have a suggested set of standard tags such as [/sarc off]
Actually there is another reason to not want to be able to edit comments. And that is when you make a comment you later try to deny. There is no way to go back and erase it (kind of like Mann trying to claim that no one has ever grafted an instrument reading onto a proxy one).
[Could you please display a list of the banned words. At present the “policy” page mentions that some words are banned but does not say which ones. Also perhaps – banned practices. Just so we know.]
‘denier’ and ‘denialist’ for sure. And I think ‘AD’ and ‘BC’ are on the skids.
philjourdan:
I strongly agree with your post at April 11, 2013 at 5:30 am.
However, there is a different type of ‘editing’ that would be beneficial although – as I understand it from above comments – it seems this cannot be provided by WordPress.
It would be good if it were possible to see how a post will appear when posted, and to be able to then alter it before posting it.
This would avoid formatting errors which many people cannot detect until after their effect occurs on the screen.
Richard
@RichardSCourtney – I have found one site that allows what you saying. I do not know how vulnerable it makes them to code injection (as is WordPress’ concern). Stardock runs a forum (called joeuser.com), where the poster can edit their comments, but others can view their edits.
I sometimes wonder whether threading would help or hinder the blog. It seems to work quite well as it is at the moment, probably because the number/length of comments on each article is not excessively long (that is I will usually try and read all comments before posting).
When the numbers routinely get up into the multi-hundred comments (such as as Judith Curry’s blog) this becomes difficult and it changes the nature of the blog. I’d be interested to hear if anyone thinks they have a ‘solution’ for how to get the best out of of chronological posting and nested-comments/threading.
——-
Preview would be nice, but the test page is almost as good. Having a voting system (thumbs-up/down) generally a bad move, and glad there isn’t one here, not least because they clearly get abused so much. I learn more through reading something that somebody has taken a bit of effort to write.
——-
I’ve never had a problem here with moderation, but I can see that it would be a good idea for people to know why posts have gone missing/removed if possible. It helps prevent people from quickly jumping to wrong conclusions: I’ve had a post removed by the BBC, apparently for using the name of an Icelandic volcano (Eyjafjallajökull) on a sporting blog. It wasn’t off topic because the article had just compared the [Italian] manager of the England team to Mt. Vesuvius, and the BBC doesn’t seem to enforce off-topic moderation. It left me with an even lower opinion of the BBC, whether it was due to a program or a moderator.
So perhaps a preview facility (with explanation) might help eliminate unfortunate choice of words or characters.
I also find that reading the same text in a different font helps the eye to catch the routine small errors.