In the last two weeks, WUWT changed the cloud service it was hosted on, and made significant changes to the way comments are handled using the new WpDiscuz commenting system, while allowed editing, comment up/down voting and many other features.
I also made a big change to the Tips and Notes page, so that it doesn’t get bogged down and need to be purged periodically..
The process of change has not been without hiccups. But, I believe they are mostly solved now.
Just a couple of caveats before the discussion.
- I can’t move the posiion of the main comment form, currently at the top of comments. The software was designed that way and people asking on the WpDiscuz support forum have also made the same request.
I can’t current make the text in nested comments the same size as the main comments. Perhaps in the future with some CSS tweaking it can be done. I’m not a CSS expert.See update below.
Comments suggestions, what ifs and polite complaints are welcome.
UPDATE: Based on feedback in this thread, I’ve disabled the “read more” comment button. Comments will load in full now.
UPDATE 2: In case you don’t know, inline image embedding works, but ONLY if you use https, not http in the URL.
UPDATE3: The differing text size between top level and threaded comments has been fixed. My thanks to Eric Worrall
UPDATE4: I added a plugin that provides a comments search next to the very top comment box. Helpful on large threads.
6/11 10AM – I had to remove it, as it was being exploited and slowed the entire system down.
UPDATE5: 04/11/18 I added another plugin, this one designed to handle YouTube and image embedding, as well as allow for direct uploads of images, audio, and video files in comments using the new icons that now appear in the comment box.
UPDATE6 BY WILLIS: I’m overjoyed to announce that Anthony has fixed the problem with the formatting on all of the previous posts. They display correctly now, so I’m able to recommend WUWT once again without reservation. Please ignore my comment below, the issue has totally gone away. My thanks to Anthony for his usual dedication to detail and his unwavering support of the blog. Well done, my friend.
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Testing, first time I tried it didn’t post.
There is some plugin installed that causes each post to be truncated with a “read more” link on the android mobile app. It’s really annoying.
The Menu works better now on iPhone. The links in the menu used to become unvisible after the first time they were used, that corrected now. The Arctic temp diagram is updated every day, previpusly I had to click on the link under the diagram to be able to see the updated version.
I am going to beat on the YouTube video problem and see what happens.
The Curly Shuffle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKAfXdb5LsA&w=560&h=315
Still no joy.
u.k.(us) and J Mac have been going at it hard. This current attempt is what J Mac came up with as a work-around. It fails here.
Video embed success seems random and sporadic. It fails a lot more often than it succeeds.
Whatever else we can say,
it does not work as advertised.
So this issue needs work.
Try, try again…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKAfXdb5LsA&w=560&h=315%5D
and
This was my main irritation with the new layout. Other than that its excellent. And really, very well done to have got the move done with so little disruption. Some was inevitable in a project of this size, but on balance it has gone very well considering the complexity.
Well, just one reservation, for a couple of days there was an endlessly flickering gif or something on the right hand side in the ads, which I found completely infuriating. But it was a one-off, so no big deal.
Anthony, many thanks for this new thread on the subject and for making changes as a result of feedback. Your 1st and 3rd updates removed my last niggles about the system, so I am about to vote in favour.
Rich.
Can’t read it in the WordPress app. Why not??
“I can’t move the posiion of the main comment form, currently at the top of comments.”
QUESTION for ANTHONY : Is a posiion (sic) some sort of quark ??
CONCLUSION & QUOTE : “You STILL NEED A POOF READER !!”
A posiion is a cation made out of antimatter.
Allow me to explain:
A common anion is Cl-, commonly called chloride.
When the Cl is made out of antimatter, the charges are reversed, so you get Cl+.
we call it a posiion because the term cation is reserved for positivly charged species made out of conventional matter.
As a safety concern, one must use care when working with multiple gram quantities of antimatter in the chemistry lab. Because of the propensity of antimatter annihilating when in contact with matter, you want to keep them separate. A multiple gram matter-antimatter annihilation would release enough energy to completely destroy the planet, so you do want to be careful.
Niggles still left.
font color in poster name is rather vile
italics and bolds are in small font on replies
Videos don’t work except by some magic when they do.
A little bumpy to start, running pretty smooth now. Some of the issues people seem to have may come from screen size. I use laptop, 13 1/2×7 1/2, running Firefox, so comments and replies were same size print. The nesting of replies takes a bit of getting used to, although it is how many other page’s comments are formatted so not that big a deal. The home page looks great and everything certainly loads faster now. Have not doodled with the new stuff, other than edit(fast typing leads to mistakes!). Just miss gravatars, Jelical is quite cross her shining face is not getting as much display as it used to.
I don’t know if it has anything to do with the new site but I am still receiving duplicate emails of every (WUWT) email I receive.
At first I wasn’t receiving any emails – they just stopped. Then when I asked on here, Anthony advised me to subscribe again, as the old subscriptions weren’t brought across to the new site automatically, so I did. Now I get two of everything. Help.
The size of the fonts are too small for my tired old eyes !
Can anything be done ?
Help us out, list your hardware/platform, browser, and operating system.
WUWT has a huge reader base, somebody is almost sure to have a fix for you.
This is a test. I am able to see this new site in Firefox right-clicking for a “new private window” . Chrome loads OK, but I am used to Firefox.
Anthony,
I am not sure how to link directly to comments any more.
I can grab the URL from the recent comments list, (which is what I did here via editing) but not from the historic thread.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/06/open-thread-poll-discuss-the-recent-changes-to-wuwt/#comment-2374860
OK ignore this comment I found the URL in the link symbol.
I would like to see a status bar that often appears on the right side of the screen when reading articles, books, etc. I would like to know how far into an article or comment I am and how much longer I would have to stay with it to finish.
When I use the “Read More” buttons in the comments section of each article, it doesn’t work so I can’t read the extra words.
The name field correctly fills in automatically as “Joe Born” for me, but it appears as “jhborn” when I post. And in all my past posts “Joe Born” has been replaced with “jhborn.” The latter is the user name I had to take out for WordPress in order to comment on another site. My “display name” for WordPress is “Joe Born.” It works at Judith Curry’s site but not here.
@Anthony Watts: Hasn’t anyone critiqued McMichael’s version of the Goldilocks principle in climate change where warming and cooling are equally harmful for health? See his book, Climate Change and the Health of Nations. This is obviously a retreat for AGW but still far from the truth. He gives rare examples of warming harming health and cooling benefiting health as if they were typical (e.g. sleeping sickness p. 211).
The first time I saw the new format/layout I was wowed. It also had a sans-serifed font which, IMHO made it look cleaner and better. I see you’ve fixed that [grin]
My second test of just pasting a url from YouTube, checking for consistency.
Join the club.
My comment against the voting buttons is currently -2. So somebody likes them. If you do have them, it would be better if the counts for + and – were separate. And even better, if you could see the user names of who voted each way. And even better, if there were categories beyond + and – , for example TL;DR and Troll! and +1000 and Idiot! and Genius! and Fascist! and whatever else those voters really meant by + and –
If users take the trouble to say what they think in words, that’s even better.
It has always been necessary to provide a password in order for any of my comments to get processed.
Name and email were entered below the comment, as here, then after the Post Comment button another page appeared demanding the password.
The few posts I made since the change don’t request a password. Is the email address acting as a password in this new version or can just anyone post under my name?
OK, my success rate of embedding a YouTube video has been running at about 50%.
Here is my latest attempt, I just copied and pasted the url:
Last test, I promise.
Attempt to copy “weather picture of the day” from WUWT side bar. Pic should be IR photo of underside of cloud. Using copy/paste of actual link to pic.
successful posting ………. this pic will show again in another future comment elsewhere when discussion warrants. I’ve been looking at it for quite some time. Need to have actual visible image to go with it. There may be some answers in that pic.
Ya might want to delve deeper and ask why the answers are somehow hidden ?
They may be in plain sight.
Kinda wish I could see it, but I just can’t ??