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.
For what is worth, the font family change is a problem for me too. Extra ink to draw each character means less visibility and less readability. Compare the main text font with the quote text font. The second is far superior in terms of clarity.
A.D. Everard
August 27, 2014 at 1:57 pm
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.
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Thanks, you said it much better….
Exactly what is wrong, or time consuming about replying to someone this way? copy..paste..and answer
Are you sure? 😉
I love the new blog format. Only suggestion is that the above quote needs to be changed at source …
I like the new theme, except I have a few comments:
1. I don’t like the font. It is too big. It looks blocky and clunky.
2. I don’t like the new header image.
3. The summary boxes for the top 5 posts don’t seem to work properly. They clump all the text together in one big sentence, losing line breaks and formatting from the actual past.
I think 3. was a problem in the 2010 theme too.
I voted “unsure” mostly because I dislike the appearance of the block quotes, especially the font.
Also, I could be mistaken, but It seems the previous format had a slightly narrower column width that worked well for rapid speed reading through all comments because of less side-to-side eyeball motion, but perhaps that’s just my own idiosyncrasy.
Finally, I’ve decided I prefer the linear format as opposed to in-line replies.
All in all, it’s a nice makeover, and a lot of work, which I recognize and certainly appreciate, especially the ability to add graphics & images to a comment.
Please see my additional comment, below, at August 28, 2014 at 8:30 am
I like the new all-articles “landing page”, and individual article formats, especially indented comments (who knew?). I know fiddling with colors and fonts is laborious and (almost) thankless work. I also appreciate the scalability issues that come with increased volume. The reader community needs to understand the new admin tools are necessary to maintain quality (not to mention, give you time to eat & sleep).
However, the content of WUWT is so rich that at some point, I simply focus on accessibility and readability. Your recent efforts do a good job of maintaining this site as the “gold standard”.
Looks nice, no real problems so far. But I’m a novice.
Nested comments encourage those who are suffering from testerone poisoning. Please, not here. WUWT commenters should be writing substantial paragraphs addressed to a broad audience. Most of them have done that for years. That is a major reason that WUWT is the best there is.
Excuse me, testosterone poisoning.
Didn’t read all the comments, so apologies if these things have already been said.
2. Navigation buttons within posts – some people lamented that the previous/next story buttons have disappeared – they haven’t! They simply moved.
True, but I have to scroll through the post to find them. When one is trying to quickly move to the next story, the link at the top was dead simple to find because all you had to do was skip to the very top. Now the links are buried somewhere between the top of the article and the bottom of the comments. Sure, if I’m reading the article, they stand out. But if I’ve skimmed a couple of paragraph and have decided I’m not interested and want to move on, finding the link isn’t simple or quick like it was before. It may be a small thing, but I find this rather annoying.
replies/nesting
There are multiple reasons why I detest this feature, even though I understand why some people like it. But my biggest issue is that I tend to read to the bottom of a thread, and a few hours later come back and refresh the window to what new comments there are. Since “replies” show up as new comments, the window will refresh at the first “reply” that I have not yet seen, which may be at the beginning of the thread, or somewhere in the middle, etc. Problem being that this leaves me scrolling from THAT comment, through all the stuff I have already seen, to try and find the stuff I haven’t. It is one thing to read the replies that already exist, quite another to return to a thread and try and make sense of what is new and what isn’t.
over all
I like the changes, and for every point above that reads as a complaint, please accept 10,000 thank yous for all you have done and continue to do.
Try clicking on the date and time of the last comment you read.
Then, when you refresh, you will remain on that comment number. Everything after it will appear for you.
(Of course, you can’t do that today, because all of the comment links are misdirecting to other comments. But that happens sometimes here. Today, when you click on a link in Recent Comments, you must scroll down to find that comment.)
davidmhoffer
I agree completely with your post.
I especially agree with your dislike of “nesting”. It destroys ability to follow a thread and makes it certain that recent comments will be missed in long threads.
One can always look for specific people. For example, if I were at a ‘solar’ thread then I would search for comments by Lief, but there may be a new or occasional commenter of merit (e.g. Spencer and Pielke occasionally post to WUWT threads) and I cannot know to search for his comment.
In summation, I think the new WUWT format is a great improvement but the adoption of ‘nested’ comments is a mistake.
Richard
Anthony, I voted “Love it!” even though I wanted a choice like “It’s a nice improvement, warts and all.”
I’m not surprised that almost every little thing has people who really like it or couldn’t care less, I’ve seen that in other venues.
I’m a bit surprised at how many people miss the comment count, but given that’s usually a good indication of the interest in the topic, I guess a lot of people have figured that out. Big wart, I hope the theme gets that added. I’ll work on getting that into my Guide to WUWT and maybe move the recent summary to the top of the page. Maybe tonight, more likely this weekend, I don’t have other plans.
Kudos to Jim Reekes. I can’t tell exactly what he did and what you did, but I suspect he did a heck of a lot more than I could have done even if I had time. One of these years I’ll learn CSS and Javascript.
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I used it not so much to gauge interest but to see if there are any new comments in a post that caught my eye. That’s why I’d like to see, in addition to the comment count and if it can be done in WordPress, the date and time of the last comment.
I know I could check the notify me via email box but I already get too much email.
Is there a reason the font keeps changing? I wasn’t fond of the new font but realized that it was different and easier to read when I posted in a thread before. After the post though, i noticed the font changing back and forth, what’s up with that? 🙂
But that provides notification of ALL comments. WP should have a box that reads, “Notify me of replies to my comment (or to replies in this comment-level, if the comment is at the lowest (3rd) level).
Click on reply, note box labeled “Notify me of follow-up comments via email.” I set up one, not sure it took. At least I didn’t get a flood of Email.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/27/status-report-on-changes-to-wuwt-with-user-poll/#comment-1720377
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Not a reply. Just testing to see if “copy link location” still works and what it looks like in the new format.
Now if you can only fix the RSS or add a full article feed to the teaser feed that only has enough words to maybe introduce the author and some irrelevant metadata or social …
I have checked i hate it. But i don’t hate it.
I just think it is heavier overall.
The comments are much more difficult to read. Now instead of a commenter text we have commenter name with such a big black characters that makes more difficult to read the text.
In the past i just speed read the comments and only if i wanted to know who wrote it i would look up to the person name . Now it is in my face.
P.S:The Poll shouldn’t use heavy loaded expressions if it is to have some value.
As far as I can tell all the changes are for the better. I like the look of everything and how the articles are presented. You have kept the good and added good to it. Good on you.
Eugene WR Gallun
I wish the Recent Posts list were higher in the sidebar, or that there were some quick way to get to it.
Didn’t vote, since you don’t have the choice “It’s your blog and you can do what you want with it; I’ll still come by each day.”
Thanks for all you do, Anthony (and mods). WUWT is a breath of fresh air in a morass of idiocy. Please keep it up.
Please consider using Verdana as the default font. It scales better than any other, which is helpful to vision-impaired readers like myself.
Blue font is hard to read. To me, it is a question of functionality over aesthetics. I read to the end of an article early in the morning then make a pencil note of the time at the end. In mid afternoon, I take a break then scroll down to my noted time and read to the bottom again. Nesting comments does not allow this to happen. My mind is still good enough to remember the original comments and tie the follow ups to the original comment(s). I had to switch to gmail, the first thing I did with my inbox was to eliminate nesting. I offer this as support for my blue font comment:
start paste
9. Using colored text Black fonts are the easiest to read, while colored typography is not recommended for body text because it can cause readability issues. Dark blue and dark green fonts are a little easier to read then others, but it’s generally best to stick to black for large paragraphs. Rather, color fonts should be used sparingly to create a sense of drama by highlighting certain words, drawing attention to your logo or creating eye-catching headlines.
end paste
As I have said many times Anthony, thank you for all of your good, hard work in the past 7 years that I have been reading WUWT.
Anthony,
I picked unsure at this point.
Good – I’m back to reading at the default size. Very nice.
Bad – nesting, hate it. Others have laid out good points for that view.
Unsure – in my usual visits to WUWT, comment count and recent comments are my two main resources. If the count is currently unavailable as it was, are you willing to bump up the recent comments widget a few spots?
Thanks,
I love the photo in the header! It reminds me of this lesson I learned a little while ago:
The Earth’s atmosphere is an extremely thin sheet of air extending from the surface of the Earth to the edge of space. The Earth is a sphere with a roughly 8000 mile diameter; the thickness of the atmosphere is about 60 miles. If the Earth were the size of a basketball, the thickness of the atmosphere could be
modeled by a thin sheet of plastic wrapped around the ball.
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/atmosphere.html
My opinion, this new format is as painful as watching the Weather Channel.
My opinion, you have an identity crisis. You have posted here as:
Pick one name and stick with it please.
Finally found a combo that works for me at least for right now… turn off all styling through the browser and now the type is large and readable, comments are actually numbered with sub-comments coming underneath each, but hard to find extraneous side-bar information and the comment edit control is so tiny but paste-able from an external text editor with spelling checking I generally use.
A WordPress level typeface selection would be so great (A-largest, A-large, A-normal type of control), it’s nearly mandatory for us aging scientists that remember science before AGWese. Nesting has its plus and minuses but in general it would be perfect if there were some supported way but via RSS to tell the actual flow sequence of comments.
I don’t mind the style per se, it is classier, but it seems so much of the functionality/type-size has changed that is making your site much harder to read and use for those of us that prefer to follow and read ALL comments and their logical flow. Some people will say nesting helps there and I agree when reading old, static threads but on a developing thread you have no way to tell where the new comments are being placed.
And BTW, I find no way to “vote”.
haven’t used it enough to say I love it (so I left poll unanswered) but I will say so far I like it.
looking good.
WP doesn’t allow editing on non-$$$ plans because it is sql heavy especially if you track edits.
but I never understood why they blocked other commenting script integration (disqus/livefrye) as that would actually be less of an sql load on them.
First kudos to Anthony for all the work you put into this site – have a big party when you hit 200 million views!
Overall, the new look is clean and modern, and the extra features will be welcomed by many. But, I voted “not sure” because:
1. Minor niggle – not displaying the author’s name on the homepage. Those of us who are time-poor sometimes have to decide quickly whether or not to read something, and knowing the author helps. If I see “Jim Steele”, I’m there, no matter what he is writing about. Others, not so much. 🙂
2. While the typeface is OK, the old one was easier to read for those of us with less than perfect eyesight. If you keep this one, darkening it a bit more would help. Getting rid of the shading was definitely an improvement – thanks for that!
3. I’m with Latimer, A D Everard and others about nesting. Again, those of us who are time poor (or just trying to avoid multiple clicks every time we return to a thread) find nesting a pain in the rear. I don’t visit Judy Curry’s and Jo Nova’s as often as I would like because of it. I usually wait until a thread has been up for a few days before I start reading.
It does encourage endless, repetitious flame wars from a few noisy and boring usual suspects. It doesn’t matter on a site with few comments, but when there are a hundred or more it becomes a deterrent to participation. But, as you have said, let’s see how it goes.
Thanks again to the boss, the mods and elves for a wonderful resource.
If I understand you correctly on #3, I think the solution would be nested sets that could either be displayed or hidden (with the number of sub-comments listed, so you’d have an idea of what you might be bypassing). The only problem I have with the Curry and Nova comments is that I still have to scroll past a lot of dreck to see if something new and interesting has been added.
With replies to particular posts nested and hidden unless opened you could scroll through the set of sets of comments more quickly and open sub-threads when you were interested in the argument first displayed. It might also discourage some of the exhibitionists that need to see their names and drivel on display and allow for the development of more reasoned discussions within sub-threads. Seems more likely to keep the main thread on topic but still allow for the development of sideline discussions. One could always post both within a subthread and in the main thread.