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.
Format away Anthony!
I know what effort is involved with catering to the masses. The current theme is an improvement IMHO. I have some issues with formatting, readability, etc… with every blog site I visit. Whether this is due to my choices of browsers, add-in’s, extensions, or OS’s I use or the site; I dunno. I do know that you listen to your visitors, and promptly address known issues. If I have any issues that prevent me from being able to connect and consume your content or quickly prove/disprove datum on your excellent reference pages, I’ll let you know. I consider this site to be a bridge between science and understanding. As I tread upon it, I keep in mind that I have to:
A) Watch my step
B) Expect construction every so often
C) Adjust to prevailing conditions
D) Be on the lookout for trolls
Thanks for doing all that you do.
~ Brian
It looks the same through RSS, and that’s just fine with me.
The new format seems okay. Some WordPress Themes look downright appalling to me, but this one seems reasonable. Ironically, WUWT was one of the blogs I looked at a lot when choosing to use Twenty-Ten for my own blog. Twenty-Ten may be showing it’s age, but it’s nice and simple, and the readability is pretty good.
On #2 … I would not poo-poo WUWT looking like a blog too much. It is a blog, after all, and some people prefer a simpler layout. But you know …. consider DrudgeReport — It looks like absolute crap, but that doesn’t seem to stymie the traffic. 😛
davidmhoffer
August 27, 2014 at 5:03 pm
‘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.’
———————————————————————————————————————–
I agree 100%. Now, what is going to happen on a solar thread when Leif answers each person by the reply button? To keep up with all of his new comments and rebuttals we are going to have to go back to each original comment and scroll through those replies, then repeat the process with each person he is dealing with. I like the way Leif does it now, show the statements he wants to comment on and his answers all in one post. Easy to read, easy to follow, no jumping around, no missing anything.
I just wish Leif would learn how to properly blockquote. It aint rocket surgery.
That’s something I’ve wanted to say for a long time. I even went to his site to find an e-mail address I could send him my opinion, but I couldn’t find one.
rogerknights said on August 28, 2014 at 9:17 am:
http://leif.org/
It’s right there on the home page, in the center in plain view, leif at leif dot org.
*head-desk*
The multi-column format does nothing for me; if I want to view other stories I go to the home page. Fortunately the RSS feed is still sequential. It would be even better if RSS feed items contained the whole post instead of just a half-line teaser.
I’m not sure yet if threading the comments was an improvement or not. The ability to switch between threaded and sequential would be really useful.
The ability to vote comments up/down would be nice. But I’m glad you haven’t gone with Disqus because of its requirement that I manually find and hit a “Load more comments” button, over and over again, before all the posts are visible to my browser and I can search them with ctrl-F. Keep them all in one big page, please!
It does seem odd that we’re allowed to use Gravatar.com to log in, but our gravatars are never shown.
PS. I just noticed, and find quite annoying, that posts no longer have links to the previous and next post (thus allowing easy sequential reading). Please bring them back, if not at the top then at the bottom.
Create a new custom blog, this one is old and bad in everything (design, speed, etc). Host the new one yourself on a cloud server.
No.
My thoughts, if anyone cares:
– I use an RSS reader (Feedly, since Google Reader went away). I rarely visit the WUWT home page, so I really have no opinion of it.
– Nested comments: Don’t care for them. As others have mentioned, you’d have to re-read an entire thread each time you come back to it in order to see new comments which are replies to others. I don’t like it on CA either. Rarely go to Jo Nova’s, but wouldn’t like it there for the same reasons. My typical WUWT experience is as follows: See new stories in RSS reader, read teaser, click through to WUWT if I;m interested, read the story, read comments if story is interesting, maybe comment, maybe not, but will keep the tab open on my browser for a couple days as I follow new comments from where I left off. Can’t do that effectively with nested. I tried using email notification, but quickly tired of constant email notifications while at work and unable to follow up. Once I’d get home I’d have to still try and figure out what was new. That lasted for about a week before I was sick of it. And if you’re following 10 stories? Can you say insanity?
What would be more effective, IMHO, is a reply button which jumps you down to the “leave a reply” box, automatically placing the comment you’re replying to inside blockquote tags. It’s then a simple matter to delete the parts of the comment you don’t need to duplicate, and add your reply below. Unfortunately that also requires some programming, javascript at the least.
Of course I can muddle through, but my WUWT experience will be greatly reduced. Of course I don’t contribute much, if anything, of value here, so some may rejoice. 😉
“What would be more effective, IMHO, is a reply button which jumps you down to the “leave a reply” box, automatically placing the comment you’re replying to inside blockquote tags. It’s then a simple matter to delete the parts of the comment you don’t need to duplicate, and add your reply below. Unfortunately that also requires some programming, javascript at the least.”
Now that would be very sweet. Very big time for the “most read resource it has become” 🙂
Amazon has a very slick setup, whereby Replies are put at the end, but there are links back and forth, and there is a thumbnail of the comment if you hover over the reply. (Or something like that. Anyway, it’s worth copying, if possible.)
All great, a big improvement. A pity the Read More link has gone, but it’s not a big issue.
And mountainape5, what a useless comment! Be helpful when people ask for help.
Zeke August 27, 2014 at 7:30 pm
Try clicking on the date and time of the last comment you read.
Then, when you refresh, you will remain on that comment number.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
In which case, I would have missed any replies to comments that I was interested in….
D***ed if you do and d***ed if you don’t….
I love everything except nested comments. But that speaks about me more than it does the blog. It makes it seem like the entire room is talking at the same time and the noise overwhelms me. Plus I can’t track with the hard turns and tangents away from the thread topic that nesting ends up encouraging.
So I use the search function (control F) to scan for certain names and topic words, and just don’t read most of the comments. Sorry about that but it is the best I can do to cope with nesting.
I like everything about the new format. Nesting is fine with me. I treat it just like I treat trolls / non-contributors, I have them pretty much figured out and skip the dreck.
I can get through even a fairly long thread in 5 – 10 minutes by speed-reading so maybe it’s me; but I like nesting due to the immediacy of response. But it can get stupid and deep leveled so I just fast-forward. It really depends on the topic for me though. Some I will pick our every word, others, I’ll just scan.
But even more important than the newness of the format, Anthony I really appreciate how you are always open to trying new things and welcoming innovation. It keeps things exciting – even inspiring.
Great blog.
What I love most is having more topics on the page without having to search through previous post pages. I usually follow several posts for quite some time so the new format makes it better for this Anthony groupie.
oops. I typed your name instead of Anth*********. The moderation filter still catches that one I see. There is something just not right about having your name in the list of bad words to say. Just not right. LOL!
Pamela, it’s so I can notice people asking me questions in the firehose stream of comments we get here daily.
To follow up on a point that’s been made by several folks.
I also don’t go to Climate Etc. or Jo Nova’s all that often.
At Judith’s, the nesting and alarmist trolls are factors. At Jo’s, it’s the nesting.
When I do visit Judith’s and Jo’s, I typically read a thread only the only time.
Here at WUWT, the linear method made following a thread enjoyable.
Latitude
August 27, 2014 at 4:14 pm
…Thanks, you said it much better….
Exactly what is wrong, or time consuming about replying to someone this way? copy..paste..and answer
*
Totally agree, Latitude, it was no trouble keeping up with what everyone was talking about or responding to, and easy to mark where we were at and come back to it.
I just tried the email thing, and got 51 emails just for this thread in a matter of hours, each with a comment, true, but they are there, not here and don’t flow at all – If I got emails with all threads I’m interested in, I’d be snowed under, they’d be jumbled together and I’d have hundreds a day to open before I could read on. So, no, it doesn’t work without a lot of hassle.
Like you, I shall miss out. We won’t be the only ones.
I also suspect the trolls will be very quick to realize they can fill up the top section of the comments with their rubbish and force readers to wade through their lot before they reach the proper dialogue. I’ve noticed some of that at Judith Curry’s already. After all, the specialty of trolls is derailment. They’ll have open go and nothing to stop them.
So, hey, things might turn around again. 🙂
By the way, Anthony – or moderator – I’m still being held up in moderation every time (I’m referring to a reply to Zeke, Aug 27th 9:50 pm where I did not mention your name or anything that should trigger moderation). I do run a WordPress blog, is that the cause of it?
That’s because there are no moderators on JC’s site, unlike here. And she virtually never bans anyone.
The trolls come in here, too, though. They are well known for trying to set the thread in new directions or attempting to ruffle feathers. Not that I mind, I find it entertaining and the quality of replies to them is excellent. I’m just pointing out that they will all group at the gate, so to speak. The old way at least forced them into order of appearance.
One thing that I hope can be brought back is that once a post is read, its headline in the “recent posts” section is grayed (or some other color) out, so that I know which posts I have read before. Memory ain’t what it used to be.
Alternatively, the New entries could be highlighted somehow (fewer changes to the text would be needed that way). This is THE solution to the objectionable aspect of nested comments, so it’s amazing that it hasn’t been “addressed.”
Oops–I misread you comment as referring to marking individual comments as read or not read. But I agree that clicked-on threads in the Recent Posts list should change color.
i don’t understand why any changes were made at all: the format was settled for years and 97% of the readers agreed with that.
🙂
because it’s human nature to muck with it when you have a good thing going….. 😉
It’s also human nature to do nothing and sit on your butt while we get overrun with bureaucracy.
That’s not me. Your dislike of the changes is noted in several places. I ask that you try to find something constructive to comment about.
The one thing constant with humanity is change. Those who don’t change are left by the side of the road.
I only have 1 dislike …and that’s the nested threaded posts….so it’s my dislike of the one thing no ‘s on the end
…the rest of it is working great….so far!
Let’s see, something constructive…..ok, got it….you’re not near as grouchy right now as I thought you would be
😀
I like the blockquote thing, although maybe the font could be a notch smaller.
As for nesting or otherwise, there are pros and cons for each. Linear posts would be fine, but only if everyone who posted a response to a comment upthread included a reference. Courtney snr. is excellent for this and it makes his replies easy to comprehend. Unfortunately, a lot of others don’t; until we’re all up to Richard’s standard, nesting will make things simpler. The downside is, of course, that it’s much more difficult to pick up from the last post read, when coming back after a time-out. I gather from something our host said that switching from one to the other as a user option isn’t possible so, on balance, I’m willing to give nesting a chance.
There is one enhancement I’d like to see and that is a ‘Preview’ option. For those of us who are occasional posters, some of the formatting codes are a b!tch to remember and to get right whilst in the throes of composition and errors do creep in.
All in all though the new look is good and only serves to enhance the quality of the content.
Fonts need work, they’re too big all around. Makes this site look like a “Jayvee” site (now where have I heard that word?). Simple to solve — find a favorite website with relaxing easy to read smaller font, and use that.
Second that !
Anthony, I came back to this thread to make just this point. I have no strong opinions on the other changes but I really dislike the ‘in your face’ fonts that are used for most of the article text. I feel like I’m being shouted at.
Too big, too bold.
I’m guessing that this has been made bigger because it is a serif family font that does not display too well at small point sizes. Probably also the reason for using a bold version of the font. Even at bigger, bolder settings I find harder to read. It is actually quite obstructive.
I imagine this will be even more of a problem on a lot of hand-held devices.
The font that I get in this box for entering a reply is a nice, simple clear font (Vandana?).
I would suggest using this or a similar Sans-serif font for the main text or articles and comments.
try doing a CTRL and – key combo to reduce size. I’m betting you are running on a small monitor, like maybe 1024×768?
Thanks for the reply Anthony.
Correct about the monitor size but this is a comment relative to recent changes, I’ve been a daily visiter here for a number of years (with same monitor and other equiptment ) and have found the previously used fonts to be much more readable.
Verdana was designed specially for relatively low res devices like computer monitors as opposed to printers with much higher precision that handle serif fonts well.
Serif fonts require high res to work well. I imagine they look nice on an Apple retina display but not so much on most hand held devices or 1024×768 monitors.
Yes, I can scale down to get smaller fonts but this just exaggerates the problems of rendering serif fonts and it gets very hard to read.
I’m on a 1080 monitor, and the font as of this comment is a perfect size. The font after the initial change was too small. This one is the goldilocks font.
While I really like the new format I think you need to adopt a standard format for the content. Here’s a current example:
Climate Alarmism: When Is This Bozo Going Down? By Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger Climate alarmism is like one of those pop-up Bozos.
With the synopsis running together it can be hard to tell what part is story and what part is headline, etc. A standard clear format should be adopted so it’s easy to understand the synopsis without having to try to decipher the run on sentences:
Climate Alarmism: When Is This Bozo Going Down?
By Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger
Climate alarmism is like one of those pop-up Bozos.
Part of that has to do with the way the front page capsule formatting works, which I have little control over. I’m putting in separators, but really can’t do more than that since then it looks odd in the actual story after clicking through.
If it isn’t possible to add additional “next” and “prev” links, as an alternative is it possible to insert an HTML tag at the link locations, and add a “goto links” button at the head and tail of the posts?
Yeah, still don’t like the nested comments, like listening to 6 conversations at once. In this thread alone, I gave up paying any attention to the discussion about a 1/3 of the way down. Maybe that’s a good thing – I’ll get a couple of hours back a day by reading the articles, ignoring the comments and moving on. Unless you’re making money off the ads – have a look at their placement – one of the biggest killers of attention is trying to pick the good stuff out of the dreck – this format can look like an “entertainment” blog really quick.
After looking at it for a couple of days, personally, I’m not a fan of the magazine format – it tends to turn WUWT into a tabloid, and nothing destroys a site credibity with smart thinkers than the appearance that it wants to be the Daily Mail. The essence (and importance) of WUWT isn’t specifically the articles (the content is available all over the web, sometimes days earlier) its the discussion about the content that makes this site. Personally, I think this format trivializes the commentary and is considerably over-styled. All of that b*tching done, I also know much work is involved in getting a WP format to work well and look good and represent your “brand”, so take the comments with a grain of salt.
A lot of space is lost by indenting the text of the first comment. This is unnecessary because the commenter’s name is in bold type and clearly separated from the text. That the replies are progressively indented is of course necessary. On IPads and iPhones space is precious and should not be compromised by estatic considerations.
Don’t underestimate the value of white space: http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol8/design_no2.htm
One of the great things about WUWT is the calling out of incorrect information by those that have a better understanding of a subject. It is a great way for many of us to learn new things and unlearn things we get wrong. The old comment style made it easy to do this. One could scan through all the new comments very quickly and read things that catch your attention. Sometimes it may be something you weren’t even thinking about but is contrary to your knowledge . It was also easier to scroll down and find certain people whom I always read, i.e: Dr Brown at Duke, Leif, Pamela Grey, Nick Stokes and yes even Mosher, to name just a few. Usually one of those comments will get me interested in that particular discussion. Nesting comments does not allow me to do this very easily and even finding those comments can be time consuming.
OK, I’m going to bang on about my pet peeve: constant finger scrolling to get to bottom or top of long lists of comments when on a tablet.
May I suggest inserting “##top” and “##bot” at top and bottom of pages (or whatever you please) so that I can issue a ‘Find in page’ to get to where ever.
BTW: I do know I can do a find on ‘leave a reply’ or ‘home’ but both can appear in text so don’t go straight to top/bottom. The special chars help.