I figured that I should give people a heads-up, rather than just dump changes unannounced like wordpress.com did with their recent beep boop editor bomb.
Two changes – comment filtering and format. Two notes: editing for guest authors and a personal note about the future of WUWT.
1. Comment filtering has become stricter
This change is already in place this week and has been necessitated by the rising amount of spam comments not just at WUWT, but all blogs seem to be getting. Steve McIntyre laments his trouble with recent spam increases here.
WUWT gets about 3 times the amount of spam that Climate Audit does, most of it commercial link-back spam disguised as a comment. I too have seen the increase, and clearing out the spam filter has become quite a chore on some days. As a result, I’ve turned on this setting in my wordpress.com dashboard:
Strict: silently discard the worst and most pervasive spam.
What this means is that occasionally, some legitimate comments that meet this criteria might get thrown out with the bathwater. Some comments that are on the fence may also go to the spam holding que for review.
So, if you make a comment and it immediately disappears, it may go straight to either of these places. But, that doesn’t mean it is lost forever, it may be in the holding queue. Give it some time to see if it is retrieved by a moderator. For overnight, typically 11PM-6AM PDT, some comments may take awhile before they are rescued.
For a few people who have no manners and have been warned and finally banned (for example, Doug Cotton and his variety of shapeshifting sock puppets, and NASA GISS scientist Jan Perlwitz who made a death threat) those comments will straight to the bit bucket. Words with the usual variety of cuss words, profanity, and banned topics, etc. will also go straight to the bit bucket.
If your comment doesn’t fit any of these categories, and you don’t see it rescued within a few hours, it may have been a victim of the new stricter spam policy. I wish this wasn’t the case, but the enormity of the spam increase requires it. There just isn’t enough time in the day as it is and we shouldn’t be wasting it wading through dreck comments to decide which require permanent deletion and which don’t. Due to WUWT being a high traffic blog and in the top 10 of wordpress.com blogs worldwide on a daily basis, it is a prime target for spammers.
Also, some comments may be held for moderation, as we’ve recently added some words to that filter. Some people who have been known to post wildly off-topic, long rants, hateful, or otherwise inappropriate comments will get the inspection of a moderator. Also, first time commenters will be held in moderation, and after the first comment is approved, you are whitelisted.
The vast majority of regular commenters are also whitelisted, but occasionally somebody may trigger moderation. One of the surest ways for your comment to be held is to put a whole bunch of links in it, which mimic commercial spam. Right now we have it set to 4 links as the maximum. If you have a comment that requires more than that, try to break it up into two comments, or just accept that your comment will be held for moderation.
Also, moderator, please step up in removing off topic comments, we have a handful of people who think that “anything goes” when it comes to posting these sorts of comments on threads. Likewise, feel free to snip and warn purveyors of abusive comments.
The WUWT comment policy page is here.
2. New format
One of the biggest problems that WUWT (and many blogs like it) is that given the linear scrolling format, stories often get shuttled to the bottom of the stack pretty quickly, especially on busy news days. This means that some topics die a premature discussion death.
WUWT readers may have noted that I’ve been trying some experiments to keep stories of interest at the top, trying for awhile a “top stories” sticky post for a few weeks. While it helped, the amount of work to keep up with it was large, and some people didn’t like it. Of course in any change, there will be those that don’t like it.
The last major format change I made to the WUWT format was in early 2010, a couple of months after Climategate broke. I found the old Freshy theme we were using then was too narrow, and restrictive (it didn’t support mobile devices well) so I opted for the new (at the time) 2010 theme, which has served us well for over 4 and half years. But, it too is now showing signs of age, especially with so many topics and so much traffic.
After months of trying out new ideas offline, I believe I’ve found a new theme that will solve the problems mentioned above, while still retaining much of the look and feel of WUWT along with being able to keep all posts in a linear scrolling format as we have before.
The new theme is called “Expound” and you can read about it here. WordPress describes it as:
Expound offers a fresh, clean magazine-styled look for any type of blog. With a responsive design that looks great on any device, its support of post formats and featured posts will help your content shine.
Here is what it will look like. I still have not included the header image. This is a scaled version to show what the scrolled areas below the main headlines look like. It will be full width on any browser, and will properly adapt to tablets and phones as well.
The five most recent stories are at the top, you can see other stories directly below by scrolling down.
The only thing that will significantly change is the front page of WUWT and some sidebar elements will be removed that are no longer relevant. Posts themselves will pretty much look the same and commenting will work as before.
One big improvement to this theme is that it will allow bigger images, 720 pixels wide, up from the previous width of 640. We’ll be able to do HD! This is important for graphs with a lot of details and some videos in HD.
Here is a full-on view of the main page before scrolling:
The change will start on Monday morning, August 25th.
The good news is that if it doesn’t work for some reason, it can be changed back.
UPDATES
UPDATE: As you can see by now, the new format is live. Like with any new format, there may be some hiccups or some things that aren’t quite right. I’ve spent the evening doing some font tuning, and I hope the body font for posts is OK now for most people. If not, you can magnify/shrink in your browser using CTRL and + keys simultaneously as well as CTRL and – keys. CTRL and 0 (zero) puts you back at default magnification.
There are a couple of missing elements, such as comment count, and “leave a comment” on main page entries, along with some other small tweaks that will be put back in over the coming days with the CSS editor. BTW, if anyone is a WordPress CSS specialist, and can help me with such tasks, please leave a note in comments – thanks, Anthony
UPDATE2: Some things that I expected to retain got broken, such as the mobile theme, which I believe is fixed now. Some other things that we are used to got broken or removed because the default theme setting didn’t support them.
The good news is that most everything can be fixed with CSS tweaks over the next few days, though I have a bit of a learning curve on these items. Anybody out there a wordpress CSS specialist?
Some things already fixed are:
- Mobile theme
- Header font and body of story font sizes
- Making body font more readable by making it sans serif
- Put back “latest posts” on sidebar since some users still need it
- Background image restored
Things I’m working on:
- Putting back real time stamps
- Putting back comment counts
- Getting comment body fonts and comment name headers sized properly
- Less white space
- About a half dozen other small tweaks
Your patience is appreciated while these things are dealt with. – Anthony
Note: editing for guest authors.
For guest authors who can post on WUWT, to get an image to appear in the top five, you’ll have to select it as a “featured image” (on the lower right sidebar) during editing, otherwise it will appear as text only. Putting a short summary in the first sentence or two is more important now, since that is what readers will see at the top of the main page.
Also, to get around invoking the horrid beep boop editor that wordpress.com refuses to dump, here is a workaround. In the dashboard, simply click on the “Posts” item but NOT on the drop down menu where it says “Add New”:
To edit a post, click on “all posts”, select the post needed to edit, and edit from there.
Personal note:
After this change settles in, I will make the decision as to whether to stick with wordpress.com any longer. They assure me they are trying to polish this beep boop editor turd fix the beep boop editor, but I’m not sure they are going to be successful. They’ve pretty well ignored users concerns in this thread, and then decided to close it.
Closing threads where users are sounding off angrily sounds like the tactics some newspapers and magazines we know that simply choose to ignore overwhelming reader input when it comes to the many climate science faux pas that grace their pages.
Bad move, WordPress. I’m not sure your free hosting is worth the hassle anymore. Many other users feel the same with this “jumped the shark” moment with the “beep boop” editor debacle. Being able to control one’s own destiny has its advantages, and I’m beginning to feel abused by wordpress.com.
BTW, the video ads that appear at the bottoms of posts give the highest payback to WUWT, should you be inclined to watch them.
Sorry, I was just clowning around. You are doing a great job. I’m happy with whatever the outcome.
OK. The day we have pink is the day I stop blogging.
I don’t think I could deal with the hot pink either!
OK, so no hot pink.
What about cold pink?
(Liquid oxygen is light blue…. ) 8<)
I wasn’t sure about the light-blue-green background, but the blockquote and code blocks show up differently so they now stand out.
Wow! I find the grey background harder to read. I assume that the text on the grey background is unchanged and is pure black. (I haven’t checked the CSS code in the source).
By all logic, I think the grey background has a higher lightness than the pale blue (on the HSL scale) , so you would think there was greater contrast than the pale blue.
But my subjective opinion is that the black on light blue is easier to read than black on light grey. My wife, who is a web designer gave the same opinion.
Hypothesis: When we see the pale blue background, we are seeing it with the cones of our eyes, but the rods (black and white) see the greater contrast and make it easier to read. But when we see the grey background, the rods have less contrast between text and background and it becomes harder to read.. Maybe for the same reason we can use a yellow highlighter on a page to text to focus attention without masking the text.
There might be some bio-science going on here.
Try it now Stephen. Do a refresh and see comment I left below this one.
Level 3 comment test.
And another comment in the same tier.
1. Yes, but your reply (a reply to a comment at Level 3) was seen, but did NOT have a reply button. The button, Anthony, was left as an orphan back at level 2.
2. Can we “re-sort” the display list so “latest replies” are still placed at the bottom of the thread? Not being able to find newer conversations inside a thread is a significant problem in reading Dr. Curry’s blog.
And my comment in Level 3 did not have a “Reply” button either.
No. I can’t please everyone for every possible situation. Sheesh.
I’ve switched the background for comment body back to white, and made the comment header have a soft gray, which I think works better.
I have also enabled nested comments, which I think will work OK in this new format. One big advantage is that you can reply directly to the person, and the comment form will come up right there where you click the “Reply” link in each comment. No more scrolling all the way to the bottom to reply to somebody!
Let’s see how it goes.
Definitely it does! Thanks a lot. I also love the nested replies. This is IMO absolutely an improvement. Again, thanks.
Oops, the format changed again.
Light grey on the name and date.
White on comment background
Blockquote light grey with shaded boarder.
All pretty good.
AND a REPLY button with Indented threading.
Now you are playing with our minds!
Well, we don’t HAVE to use the reply button. We can reply to an upthread comment as before, we just have another option. AND we can reply to our one comments for immediate errata, corrections and second thoughts. What’s not to like?
Correction:
AND we can reply to our
oneown comments for immediate errata, corrections and second thoughts. What’s not to like?[test and example of a threaded correction]
Anthony, this a major change and worth testing for a day or two. Threaded replies will be behavior change for readers. It will be interesting to see how it’s use evolves.
Two other changes I would like to suggest:
1. The Time and Date of the comment are now medium grey on a light grey background. It is already as smaller and different font than the poster’s name. I see no reason the Time/Date shouldn’t be made black or at least dark grey.
2. The font in this “Leave a Reply” window is as small as I would go. I think earlier versions had larger fonts. Making the font one size larger would be worth testing.
I look forward to hearing some backstory about the CSS changes you made when the dust settles.
I know absolutely nothing about setting up a web site. I had to google CSS to see what that was.
It is very interesting to watch as Anthony works to create a new and customized format here @ur momisugly WUWT. I’m sure it is quite a headache to say the least. I’m confident that the final result will be best on the web!
Anthony, as I sign off for the evening I just want to say that the comments section looks great (fonts, contrast, sizing, spacing, etc.). I like the light grey between the comments. I doesn’t distract the eyes while scanning. The date and time of comment is much less important than the comments themselves. I have no opinion as to the tiered commenting as there are pros and cons.
Just my 2 cents worth.
Looking forward to visiting this thread again to follow the updates.
From Anthony Watts on August 26, 2014 at 9:12 pm:
For me that means before I can finally close a tab that people have stopped commenting on, I’ll have to scan the entire comment list for new entries.
It also means late-posted derogatory comments can be effectively hidden, months later I’ll look at an old story and find in the comments “Ha ha you silly den-i-er, your crap was already debunked on Skeptical Science!” as a reply to the third comment, on the last day before comments closed, and the “debunking” was crud 90% of us could dismiss with a quick link if we knew it was there.
Then see the same thing repeated at the fifth comment, seventh, twenty-ninth…
Likewise the spam posts won’t be easily noticed at the bottom.
No, comments close automatically after two weeks – Anthony
Anthony,
Is that something new, too? I seem to remember months-old posts still being open to comments?
Or did you change that long ago and I’m just now catching up?
kadaka has a point. If the closure of the comments is predictable, then a malicious strategy would be to bomb the replies with insults an hour before lockout. With an unthreaded list, the trash would be at the bottom of the list and much less effective.
As I said earlier. It will be interesting to see how behaviors of posters evolve.
Gosh people, just give the worrygasm a rest. None of you have to deal with such things IF they happen. I DO.
From Anthony Watts August 26, 2014 at 10:38 pm:
I know, but it’s the 13th-day comments that are snuck in. Although trolls often lack patience, so things show up after posts are quiet for only a day or two, my preferred “waiting period” before closing.
Another issue, comment nesting is a trick that won’t show up on text-only browsers, blind and near-blind people using reading programs likely will also miss out.
There is this:
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/none-of-my-blogs-displaying-properly?replies=21
This has been an ongoing problem lately for me, without the css loading I get one column with numbered comments. Sometimes I have to reconnect several times until the routing clears up and css loads. Somehow this theme loads more reliably.
(Yes, I’ll be getting DSL after moving email to Gmail, Extreme DSL has dry loop cheaper than dial-up, toss in a MagickJack as well.)
Without css, no nesting, much confusion.
Kadaka – I’m not buying the worry, sorry. If what you say was true about “comments sneaking in” we’d have them now EVERY DAY as old threads close. But, we don’t.
It stays, we’ll see how it works out, and I’ll take input from a broader section of people rather than instant naysayers.
All the fine tuning has paid off handsomely, Anthony. The extra leading (white space) between the lines is a further improvement to readability.
The blog is looking professional, user-friendly (ghastly cliche), and very smart. It conveys excellence.
Seeing you have an enquiring mind, you might be interested to read Handling Newspaper Text by Harold Evans (a former editor of The Sunday Times in London) pub. 1974. Ch 2 is The Readability of Newspaper Text. The basic principles are the same for words read in print (hard copy) and words read on-screen. As you would expect, it all gets back to the human being doing the reading, and the interaction between eye and mind.
The term ‘leading’ refers to the days of Linotype hot metal printing, when the compositors inserted flat metal (lead) slugs between the lines of metal type to create a space.
I look at WUWT on my Android phone and find the articles and posts are in a thin column down the centre. Posts get so thin the column is one word wide. Holding the phone sideways, which is uncomfortable, helps but only slightly.
Is there something to help this?
(if this has been answered already I didn’t spot it – there are a lot of replies).
Thanks
Margaret, I’ve looked at several Android phones, and this isn’t happening on them. You might try resetting your browser cache and/or make sure you’ve allowed your browser to be updated to the latest.
Also be sure you’re using Chrome for best results. The stock Android browser (usually just “browser” or “internet”) is often modified by the phone manufacturer or service provider. When I do mobile website testing, that’s where I find a lot of problems – and there are so many they can’t really be accounted for.
Thanks. I am no computer geek but I’ll see the O2 guru tomorrow.
Anthony
Ok, this is all looking pretty good. Congratulations. Bearing in mind the resistance to change shown here I’m glad I’m not a politician trying to change an entire country whilst hoping to still get re-elected!
I’ll give the ‘reply’ facility a go. Not sure how we will notice comments that are inserted days after the event. On the whole I prefer the linear format of WUWT over the nesting format of Climate Etc but let’s give it a fair chance.
tonyb
Anthony, what did WordPress do? CA Assistant no longer shows at the top of page here or with Twenty Ten on my one blog, but still does at Climate Audit and my other blog. The script is still there working, as seen by the comment box. My affected blog was the one I tried the dropdown option.
To summarize the long hours of troubleshooting, it’s not my cookies or cache, it’s not the Archives widget, switching to and from a different theme doesn’t help.
What mattered on my blog was if there was a comment on the page. If comment, no CA Assistant on top. I had a post with a test comment, deleting the comment restored the CA Assistant controls.
I checked what I thought was the unaffected blog. Same thing, comment on page, no controls on top.
Climate Audit seems unaffected.
CA Assistant has options for coloring comments based on age, to easily spot new ones. It can also hide old comments. Works on Climate Audit. On my blogs it was working even when the controls weren’t showing.
WUWT does not have the comment coloring. The main page, which doesn’t have comments, does not have the controls. “Submit Story”, a simpler page without comments, does not have the controls. WUWT has the comment box improvements, and that’s all.
PS: CA Assistant needs the wordpress-dot-com Javascript on for the controls to work, but not from the particular site.
Anthony, what did WordPress do?
Hard to say, they have been mucking about with the base code almost daily for two weeks now based on my observations. A lot of it has to do with that horrid “beep boop” editor they are trying to get everyone to use.
Anthony Watts
August 26, 2014 at 9:12 pm
I have also enabled nested comments, which I think will work OK in this new format. One big advantage is that you can reply directly to the person, and the comment form will come up right there where you click the “Reply” link in each comment. No more scrolling all the way to the bottom to reply to somebody!
Let’s see how it goes.
======
LOL …. no, now we have to scroll all the way from the top to the bottom each time we check a thread… to see if there’s a conversation we missed
You’re having way too much fun playing with your new toys! 😉
I strongly prefer the previous layout. It was functional, very readable, and I liked seeing more than one paragraph on the main page. I really don’t care for this new layout.