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.
Do you have a Google account? Do you use Chrome and if so, do you sign in when you do? Do you clear your cookies and delete your history after every browser session?
Google’s not the only company that engages in these practices, BTW.
Out of idle curiousity, what are the criteria for being white-listed?
REPLY: You have to have previously approved comments that have not been flagged by the spam filter. This is an automatic function of wordpress that is enabled now. – Anthony
Anthony,
I agree with many above that if it is possible to have a Comment#xyz appended in some way to each post would be helpful for discussion. I also agree that threading is not as good as chronological. The one comment which suggested the poster be allowed “delete post” (for a few minutes only) so he could copy and effectively edit, would be great if possible to implement easily.
The best site I have yet seen for commenting on posts is the ancient and venerable freerepublic.com … comments are non-threaded, can include “reply to”, and though they can’t be edited or deleted, includes a “preview” option. A “thread” within a discussion can be followed via post number if someone desires to do that. I am surprised sites like WordPress did not implement something more similar to that concept.
I still think numbering the comments would be very helpful so when you go away from the page and come back you can start where you left off. Actually, some pages do that automatically, but on WUWT when i leave it for a second and come back, it always starts me back at the top of the blog for some reason.
Wow…well done. Great to hear about that. 🙂
majormike1 says:
April 10, 2013 at 5:06 pm
No wonder I am always “awaiting moderation”. After being a moderate “Mike” for 70 years.
REPLY: No, assmart – Anthony
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I didn’t know “Strongasanoxandnearlyassmart” – my blog is “Strong as an ox and nearly as smart” – appeared anywhere. That’s the phrase Pop would say when people complimented him on his big sons. Since I don’t want to change, i’ll just have to accept being moderated.
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Underscores are your friend. Having the letters a s and s in sequence with no spaces is what is triping the spam filter.
Having just committed a “?blockquote” for a “/blockquote” on another thread … is it possible to “alias” common formatting foulups and have WP “compile” the correct version on the page?
And yes, noticed the impressive speed increase upstream here, then felt foolish that much quicker a few moments ago … 😐
Wow, John Whitman has “anal” in his URL. It’s worse than he thought!!
Seriously, well done Anthony, wonderful site, my daily must-read. Grateful thanks to you, your mods, your regular contributors and of course your family.
John B
re: John Whitman says April 11, 2013 at 9:52 am
Can you try this?
This URL (“l” replaced with “x” for demo purposes):
premisedetectionand anax ysis.wordpress.com/
changed to this URL (see the %6c chars?):
premisedetectionand ana%6c ysis.wordpress.com/
Resulting (operationally) in this (taking out the spaces):
http://premisedetectionandana%6cysis.wordpress.com/
The difference? the second one has “%6c” replacing the letter “l” (L) after the “ana”.
Hex chars per this chart: http://www.asciitable.com/
Don’t know if the method works in the name yet, since no one has tried it yet.
(WENT through this drill upthread but apparently I was ‘speaking geek’)
.
If I use the same email that I have in my own WordPress blog, WordPress requires that I sign in. Let’s try if this has been changed.
Cool, no moderation this time. Just login to WordPress.
But I would have kept Cherry Pick here, because totuudenhenki is not Engish.
I used the frequent a site where one user managed to sign up with a name that included a word that wasn’t allowed in comment text. I never figured out what the word was, but it was a great trick if the intention was to spout nonsense nobody could object to.
@ur momisugly richardcourtney
did that thanks that really works (took me back to my own comment right away LOL)
As usual, I’ve gone right down the thread and I would concur with the commenters who said something along the lines of ‘there is much, if not more, to be gained from reading the comments as from the lead article’.
I’m undecided on the threading business. Having got used to it during early excursions into the great debate, there are times I miss it on here. I can see the points against it when you have to scroll up or down (depending on the site) to find out if there has been a response to any earlier comment. I’ll leave that to Anthony’s choice or the majority vote and live with it.
The one thing I would agree on though, is a Preview option (qv JoNova) as even though I’m a dedicated proofer before posting, even I miss the odd typo if I’m commenting late at night (UK), so that’s one thing I would welcome.
Great stuff as per normal.
Analysis contains a verboten WP word.
Wonders to behold.
John
grumpydenier says:\
Threading was tried here a number of years ago and proved unpopular as I recall.
DaveE.
Another check to see if my comment is processed by the new faster processing method.
[did not use my potentially problematic verboten word containing website name in my comment info]
Crossing my fingers that I am no longer flagged by WP!
John
Bair Polaire says: April 11, 2013 at 4:46 am
Future Improvements?
I would like to have a Reference Page on the physics of the postulated CO2-warming-effect.
What do you think?
I think it’s a good idea to create a CO2 Reference Page offering a combination of the available CO2 data, as well as delving into the science behind CO2’s influence on earth’s climate system. However, there are a few other pages and projects in process, including the WUWT Paleoclimate Reference Page;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/global-weather-climate/paleoclimate/
thus the CO2 Reference Page will likely take a while to come together.
The trouble with all the hints to bypass prohibited strings in your home website URL is that WordPress auto-populates the Website field if you’re already logged into WordPress, or if you use an email account that’s tied to a WordPress account.
The alternative is to use an email not tied to WordPress and populate the field yourself. The WordPress cookie with remember it and you won’t have to re-fill it every time.
Like this one to a Karen Carpenter youtube video (if it works).
– – – – – – –
Yeah!
My comment got the new faster WUWT comment processing. Finally.
But in the long term I am going to need to do something about WP flagging my website name because it parses a part of a normal word as verboten. : (
John
Wow that’s crazy fast posting. I like it!
Thanks Anthony!
LOL! I just remarked on how fast my comments are posting, but in doing so apparently I tripped one of the moderation keywords this time and my post is awaiting moderation. Ah, life’s little ironies…
I still like it!
Thanks Anthony!
Analysis.
Seeing if that word triggers WP flagging me.
NOTE: Did not insert my website to eliminate that as a cause for my being flagged because it contains analysis.
NOTE: I am not logged into my WP blog account.
NOTE: the email address I use for commenting is different than the one i use for my WP blog. So email should not be a trigger for WP flagging me here on WUWT . . . I think.
Here goes . . .
John
Good. That comment got the the new instant comment approval treatment.
So it could be WP’s parsing of my URL to find a verboten word that causes WP to flag me when I use it in commenting.
John