As readers know, I announced changes to WUWT’s format last Sunday, and the changes went into effect overnight from Sunday night to Monday morning. As is the case with any change, there will be some issues, some people won’t like it simply because it is change, and some will embrace it. Below I’ll address the improvements and the things remaining to be fixed.
My goal was to bring WUWT into a more modern realm and address these issues:
- Scroll off – stories often disappeared down the page too quickly and didn’t get seen
- Style – WUWT still looked like a blog rather than the most read resource it has become
- Readability – The way it was presented didn’t lend itself to readability as well as it should
- Mobile compatibility – the mobile theme we used to have was terrible, we needed to make the experience better for tablet users and phone users
- Comment filtering – was problematic, too many comments were being held that shouldn’t be, some comments that should be held for inspection haven’t been
- Comment reading – there was a lot of room for improvement
- Comment SPAM – moderators were getting overwhelmed
What we’ve done and learned:
1. Scroll off – stories often disappeared down the page too quickly and didn’t get seen – The new Expound theme format of providing “capsules” on the main page seems to have solved this nicely. I can report we are getting a consistent 40-50% increase in daily page views, which means more people are reading stories than they were before. I call that success. Also, the new format provides for “infinite scroll” on the main page, making it easier to find older stories. Just keep scrolling down.
2. Style – WUWT still looked like a blog rather than the most read resource it has become – Besides the new theme format making WUWT more professionally styled from the get-go, I’ve spent since Sunday night making CSS tweaks to all sorts of visual style parameters, many of which were brought up in the previous thread. I could not have done this without the help of WUWT reader Jim Reekes, who offered help in that original thread. At this point, I think most of the major style, color, and formatting issues have been addressed. However, there may be some that can still be improved upon. I’ve tried to accomodate many requests, but I can’t please everyone. What we have now is what I consider the best strategy based on user input.
3. Readability – The way it was presented didn’t lend itself to readability as well as it should – Font size tweaks and color tweaks have made WUWT more readable, IMHO. Jim has helped be put the fonts into “em” mode in CSS, which helps them scale much better to various venues. Your mileage may vary. Bear in mind that for those who have font size issues, the zoom control of your browser using the CTRL and + or CTRL and – key combinations is your best friend. BTW CTRL and 0 (zero) resets your zoom. Pressing CTRL and the scroll wheel on your mouse does the same thing,
4. Mobile compatibility – the mobile theme we used to have was terrible, we needed to make the experience better for tablet users and phone users– From what I’ve seen myself on my own set of mobile devices, and the reports I’m getting from users, the new mobile device compatible theme is a win all around.
5. Comment filtering – was problematic, too many comments were being held that shouldn’t be, some comments that should be held for inspection haven’t been – I’ve spent several hours tweaking this, with the most recent change made this morning that caught a problem that caused a lot of comments to be held when they were not supposed to be. We’ll see how the new setup goes. For those suddenly have a comment in moderation that think that their comment is being held on purpose, bear in mind that this is algorithm and keyword based, and never perfect. Don’t take it personally. Some people who have been problematic, such as doing thread bombing with off-topic posts or otherwise making nuisances of themselves may still be held for moderation.
As before, if you need attention, leave a new comment with the full word “moderator” in it. Comments that use my name are also held, so that I see them in the firehose of comments we get daily.
6. Comment reading – there was a lot of room for improvement – I think we’ve got this one sorted out. Early versions of the theme for comments weren’t very good, but I think we have a good balance of size, color and style now. Many people have reported they like the new 3D offset for blockquoted text. Thank Jim Reekes for that one.
In the past, we’ve had a lot of requests for threaded comments, and I tried it a couple of times, but didn’t like the way it flowed. Some readers didn’t either. Now, I’ve enabled threaded/nested comments again, and I think it works better with the new format. Both Climate Audit and Judith Curry’s sites use threaded comments, and while “me too” isn’t a reason, being able to reply to people directly below or to make a correction update directly below your own comments is.
As it stands now, pressing the small blue “Reply” link below a comment will pop up the comment form right there in place, no more scrolling to the bottom to post comments, though you can still do that.
TonyB writes on the original change thread:
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.
If you want, you can be notified of new comments via email, simply by checking the box on the comment submission form where I highlighted in yellow:
Some people don’t like threaded comments, and I get that. But let’s see how it goes with the new format. Some people worried that nested comments would allow “last word” derogatory comments to happen months later. That’s rubbish, we have tool in place to prevent such things from happening, though I’m not going to give details to what they are. Basically, we don’t have the problem now with regular linear comments, nested comments won’t make this non-problem worse.
NOTE: You can test comments before posting them on the WUWT “test” page. Get them right by trial/error, then copy/paste them where you want them to be. There’s also help there too for making italics, bolds, blockquote, and other codes.
One thing you can do right now is to insert images, simply by putting in the image URL in the form http://someserver.com/images/graphic.jpg (.gif and .png files are also supported) WordPress will automatically format and display the image in comments.
7. Comment SPAM – moderators were getting overwhelmed – I think we have this under control now, though spammers are always trying new things.
Things that remain to be addressed:
1. There are a couple of missing elements, such as comment count, and “leave a comment” on main page entries – I had hoped this was available to tweak in CSS; sadly, no. This feature is actually missing from the Expound theme. WordPress has a bug report into the developer, so we’ll see how that goes. Unless the developer fixes the theme, I can’t address this feature unless I move WUWT off of wordpress.com and onto private hosting. WordPress.com doesn’t allow us to tweak PHP code for security reasons.
For now, comment counts appear on the top of the story itself after you click to see it in full. In the meantime, for those that want to see which posts are getting the most traffic, can view the Top Posts & Pages on the right sidebar.
2. Navigation buttons within posts – some people lamented that the previous/next story buttons have disappeared – they haven’t! They simply moved. See screencap below. They are at the bottom of the story. Like with the comment count issue, I can’t move them unless I move my entire blog.
3. Comment editing – a feature to allow editing of ones comments for a few minutes after posting – this is my most requested feature over the years, and wordpress.com has steadfastly refused to provide this feature even though I continually ask for it. Again, I can’t implement this unless I move off wordpress.com or pay their $500/month “Enterprise” service…which I tried last year, and was a disaster in my view. It wasn’t worth the money and the comment editor they provided was lame.
And there may be others that need attention that have gotten lost in the shuffle, or haven’t been noticed yet.
While I can’t promise we can handle all requests, we’ll at least try.
Finally, I’d like your opinion on the changes in this poll.
Thanks to everyone for your patience through this upgrade, and thanks for being part of the WUWT community.
I’ll have another major announcement coming next week, a big one that will allow our community to make a difference in what Michael Mann calls “The Climate Wars” Stay tuned.
UPDATE:
Readers may recall in the original thread that I made quite a stink about the new WordPress “beep boop” editor, and even wrote a full post about why I thought it was a stunning failure. WordPress seemed oblivious, but I and many others continued to bombard them with emails, posts, phone calls, and anything we could do to tell them how bad this change was.
Today, all of the sudden, things were back to normal, and this appeared above the editor page:
That “new and improved posting experience” aka the “beep boop” editor, is corp-speak for “we took this turkey out back and shot it in the head”.
Two thoughts:
1. Users win. Lesson to WordPress – trust your users.
2. Thank you WordPress for finally seeing the light.
I will add this and that is I really like and appreciate this site.
Banner – WUWT -love it…..not a rainbow and that is good. Slimmer, less real estate.
4 columns set up – I don’t care although I tend to scan articles up and down and may miss one… OK though.
Commenting – testing now… If you can see this is is working for me using Opera today. Commenting is a main attraction to your site.
Styling – looks nice and “professional” but I don’t care.
Images with articles – I am visual and respond well to image cues.
Looks like a lot of work right here doing this.
Nice Job.
Self reply on Commenting… works fine for me with Opera. I think I will like the nested context replies… It will be harder for trolls to disrupt .
Which Opera, The Magic Flute?
All in all, I think this format change is a move into the new century. I think it is fine — and the few missing bits seem to be a Word Press thing anyway.
Well done.
Works and looks great on my mobile devices and PC. Great work!
Now if I can only find a mobile browser with a vertical scroll bar…….
Anthony,
Just one point. Bolded quoted parts of text don’t come out well on my latest version of Firefox, but is OK on Explorer. What to do?
For threaded comments: Some indication that what you are looking at is pat of a thread, and not a top-level comment would be useful.
I voted love it after two days. Thanks for
hard work.
Latitude
August 27, 2014 at 11:31 am
nested threaded comments (whatever they are called) are going to have to be ignored by me…
*
I’m with Latitude on this. The only way I get to enjoy Judith Curry’s full dialogue in comments, or Jo Nova’s, is if I leave reading their articles until it is old news and most of the comments are in. By then, often as not, I don’t get back to it at all because – guess what? – it’s old news.
With WUWT, I got everything and never missed a comment. No more. Yes, I could be emailed 50 times or a 100 for each thread to tell me of each new comment is in, but I won’t bother. I’d be inundated. That will also cut down my visits here as there is no point checking for comments hidden in the main body of the thread and only finding the handful added to the end.
That means, instead of coming in multiple times a day, I’m better off visiting once a week, just so there is something to read in the old stuff. As for any new stuff, basically, I’ll have to read your headlines and move on. Sorry, Anthony, it wouldn’t matter if you only got 20 comments per thread, but you get hundreds and you’re making it hard work for your readers who want to keep up with the dialogue. I would have to comb through each thread multiple times every day, re-reading all the comments to find which are the new ones, which alone would take hours. All I had to do before was refresh the page.
The email updates are very tidy. You do not receive 50 to 100 emails. The new comments all appear in same email (which has the same title as the post), in your inbox.
It is hard to remember to check the box to get the emails updates, and also, you have to make a comment in order to get the comments in your email. If you don’t have anything much to contribute, you have to follow the thread without emails.
Some of the research and comments are then in your email history for later reference because you have copies. Or you can delete the thread. So that is how it works.
You can still follow the link in the email back to WUWT, and this will give WUWT back some of the web traffic it might have missed from lurking. I have wondered if a drop in hits would occur if more people used the neat email update feature. I don’t have an answer for that.
But that pulls you into commenting.
I have very little to say but can understand the debate. I need discouragement from contaminating the debate with my views – except on the subject of my views, of course. But should be welcomed to lurk.
The design changes are great. It looks good.
But nesting comments will change the nature of the resource, Not a good change, in my opinion.
Thanks, Zeke. Just to clarify, are you saying the comments themselves will be emailed, not just notification? That might be okay. It’s the searching through and rereading (again and again) the comments I’ve already seen that I’m against. To me, missing half (or more) of the dialogue meant losing the community, which is what I come here for.
I love the rest of the changes – just not this. I’ll try it. 🙂
Hi M. Courtney. Maybe we can post simply saying, “Posting to get emailed comments.” I’m willing, if it works that way. If notification is simply notification, then it doesn’t help.
@ADEverard, with the new format, you receive the full text of each new comment, whether it is upstream or most recent. If the comment is a reply to another, it tells you that. It is a good feature.
Hi Zeke – well, I’ve tried it now. It does give each comment, but not neatly together. I’ve received 51 emails since I last posted here (some hours now, but just the one thread). So I’ll need to think about that some more. At least I get the comments, though, and in the right order.
Interesting. Perhaps I get all comments in one email because I have a WordPress account.
It’s not that, I have a WordPress account, too. Clearly, there’s some setting somewhere I don’t know about. I rather liked the idea of all comments neatly packaged. 🙂
I’m sorry we couldn’t get you set up with that.
I also “follow” WUWT but I don’t know if that really helps.
Me, too. 🙂
Zeke, I may have found it! At the bottom of each email is a subscriptions option link. From there, not in settings, but in comments, there’s a delivery frequency dropdown tag. Mine was set for “immediately”, but there is also “daily” and “weekly”. So I shall try one of those.
I’m writing this, one to click the “notify me” box again, but also to thank you. If you had not mentioned it, I would not have known the option was there. I’ll let you know how it goes. Cheers! 🙂
Sorry, under “sites” (not “comments”).
Thanks ADEverard. Look, I found this setting also sends you all the comments. I just tested it and it works. (This is under the “Edit Blogs I Follow” section of your wordpress account.) It is waaayyy too much for WUWT but it might be fun for a less busy site. It sends one email per post, all comments included.
FYI, my new posts by email from WUWT is set for Weekly.
Thank you so much, Zeke, you’ve helped a lot. 😀
The new format is excellent. To me it looks more professional and more readable.
Onwards and upwards is my impression.
This is one of my favorite sites, if not the top, certainly in the top 2 :).
Is there any ways to control the foreground text color in the comments?
Reason I ask is that most of the wp sites appear to have the normal comment text darkness at ~75% or less, i.e., grey and starting to fade into the background. The peepers aren’t what they used to be here.
Or is there some setting in my browser (firefox) that I have overlooked?
OTH, typing this in the Reply box appears as normal black on white just fine.
Doug, refresh and have a look now. I darkened the comment text slightly.
Thanks, a little bit :). If I had my druthers, one more notch please.
Yes, please darken it another notch (or two)!!! I dislike the gray look so much it’s almost outweighed all the other positive changes. Who’ll object if it’s darker??
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Also, holding down the CTRL key and hitting the F key will bring up (somewhere on your browser) a “Find in page” line. Type in the word or phrase (your name?) you are looking for and you can then scroll down or up to see replies. (But you will still need to open the post in question.)
Regarding the poll, I said “unsure” because love it or hate it didn’t reflect my opinion.
My opinion would be more along the lines of, “If it makes it easier and works for you, I’ll get used to it.”
Thanks for having this blog at all!
I like the new format. The only suggestion would be to change the color of hotlinks when they are clicked, so it’s easy to tell what has already been read. Sometimes the same link is in another comment, and a color change would show the reader they have already seen it.
Otherwise, it’s a big improvement. Thanks for all the effort!
I like the theme so much I installed it on one my my self-hosted blogs this morning. I also tweaked it quite a bit but I’m too busy right now to fiddle the PHP code but plan to do so later. The documentation is pretty weak but the visual impact is excellent. Like most WP themes a certain amount of reverse engineering is needed. We need an Expound theme co-op for these optimizations. I’m going to post a theme mod page to both document and share what I’ve done else I’ll forget in 3 months when the next WP upgrade comes along.
Anthony, from my viewpoint it’s all good. This comes from a frequent visitor (at least once a day) who was entirely at home with the old setup.
I used the nested feature above to reply to someone who prefers sans fonts. I can repeat here: Keep the serifs! Much easier for me (it’s a demographic thing), and the sans-lovers are notable (and to be commended) for their relative ease of adaptation.
Hope this makes life easier for you and your mods. In your honour I might paint my screen white.
Anthony, Thank You, I tell you 3 times. I am a reader, not a commenter, I came here in 2008 or 2009 looking for info on Stevenson screens, had fun with the Surface Stations pages, and I have been here daily since. I will repaint something white for you also. I was here Saturday morning when you hit 100,00,000 page views, I hope I can do it again this Saturday. Break a leg next week, I can’t wait.
I like the serifs too. A couple of days ago they were back, but only for a few hours.
Some sites offer the option of Nested or Flat for comments (IMDB for example), so you can flip between the two views. Don’t know if WordPress can do this, though.
The recent font changes seem to work well.
Some of the commenters names used to be live links…..is this no more ?
They’re still live links, but you have to hover over them to detect which they are. This should be fixed.
The main thing that concerned me was the font readability. It is now much improved, so many thanks for that. I think it would be better still if it was the same font as appears in comment boxes prior to posting, but nonetheless, it is definitely no longer off-putting.
My overall verdict at this point is that the changes have been worthwhile and successful; as you say, Anthony, let’s see how the nesting works out. I’m used to it on Judith and Jo’s blogs, so it’ll probably work here so long as it doesn’t go too deep.
We’re lucky to have this WUWT resource, Anthony, and a responsive blog owner like yourself. You put in enormous time and effort and are doing not only your regular readers, but the whole world, a great service by having the blog at all. Hence it would be churlish to niggle about minor things one might not think perfect: As you say, you can’t possibly please everyone, but to me it looks like you’ve made some excellent choices and achieved a near-optimal result.
Gosh, I’m blushing. Thanks.
Fantastic changes Anthony. The website looks impressive and the content is the best there is on this subject. Thanks for implementing threaded comments too. Some people don’t like them but when you read the old linear comments you can see that there are threads (people will copy and paste the comment they are replying to) in there so it makes sense to formalise this.
Your efforts in this area have been more than justified as you have done the difficult task of making something that was very good even better.
I do like the reply feature as it allows specific conversations to be followed easier. The best blog for comment layout is Jo Nova where the common html tags are available at the top of the comment box and there is a “preview” button. The combination of these things prevent the vast majority of posting errors. Also she has green and red thumbs. These are great for people to express a “drive-by” opinion quickly and easily. Having only a “Like” button is the progressive version – you are only allowed to like other people and if you “dislike” then you must be a bad person.
Like!
The new format is excellent Anthony. Now replies (if made use of) are bundled together rather than scattered willy-nilly. I am in awe how you keep up the pace of this blog. Best regards.
As a long-time reader and fairly regular commenter…
I really, really, really, really (did I remember to mention ‘really’?) like all the changes…
…except the in-line replies. If you are checking in on article from time to time because it has generated a lot of comments, you always have to start over at the top to look for new in-line replies. Without the in-line comments, just scroll down to where you left off and keep going. And if there has been an added in-line reply from a moderator or the author of the article, it’s easy to catch as you’re scrolling down to where you left off.
All the other changes have been aces. They are genuine improvements in my book. I like it!
Top job! Well done, Anthony.
I like most of the changes, but not a fan of nesting. We’ll see how it goes. I think the activity at Judith Curry’s site has soured be on nesting, where a few diehards waste everyone’s time replying to each other.
I haven’t seen it here yet, maybe because you have a lot more unique (in every sense of the word!) commenters. Also, you have so many new posts that folks don’t end up in the same comment thread for days and days.
And last, really appreciate all your effort and how responsive you are to your readers.
Looks great to me. If more people are reading key posts, it is a good thing.
I like the current format. However two things that I consider need looking at are.
1) Too much WHITE SPACE, it could do with a little less. The white space does make a difference in reading especially the clarity of what is being read. However too me its just a little too much. That is, the white space is overpowering the rest of the format.
2a) I prefer threaded comments, as one is able to follow a conversation on a given point. The problem with nested comments is when they go too deep and the text becomes squashed vertically (maybe the ctrl + wheel might compensate for this). This might be a problem that can be visited, I believe this issue has come up before.
2b) Is it possible for users to alternate between nested and non nested comments, themselves?
Regards
Climate Heritic
PS Anthony, really appreciate all your effort that you have done in exposing the real truth behind the climate.