New Year, New WUWT, New Initiative

After a year of mostly being on hiatus, I’m coming back to regular daily operations. As previously mentioned, there will be an announcement forthcoming related to that and to the larger news that enables me to spend much more time at WUWT than ever before. This will include some plans for expansion, as well as some significant changes about how we operate.

The biggest change is a new initiative with new partners, which I hope to be able to announce any day now. Just waiting on paperwork.

One change will affect our readers, and make for a better reading and commenting experience overall, and it will be starting this coming week.

One of the biggest problems we’ve had is with trolls that use fake names, fake emails, and fake connections (proxys) to threadbomb. One in particular in Oregon has bragged about it, one in Canada made threats, and I called the police on him.

And, it keeps happening; some people who are narcissistic mann-equins think they are entitled to do it, because they are holier-than-thou defenders of the planet or something. Some of these same people also impersonate other commenters here. We’ve stopped them all (at least we think we have). But, we need better tools to detect and stop this.

This coming week, WUWT will no longer be an open commenting system, it will require registration to comment. I’ll give 24 hours notice, and it will likely be next Monday. Many, many, websites that allow comments require this, and it has become clear to me, that we need to go that direction too. Doing so will help keep the quality of conversation elevated, and will only require a one-time registration that will take about two minutes to complete. It will stop the trolls, the impersonators, and the drive-bys and give us a tool for enforcing our commenting policy. It will also ease moderation duties.

Reading content will still be publicly available as I abhor paywalls, and I know you do too.

And there will be other changes, including better search, better commenting tools, and an expanded reference section drawing from the WUWT archives setup as a separate but complimentary website.

The new initiative with new partners will give us a big boost, plus help other climate skeptic websites too. The separate climate reference website in the works, so you don’t have to wade through the over 20,000 articles here.

The plan is simple: A rising tide lifts all boats, where the “boats” is climate skepticism worldwide. To that end, invite a friend to visit WUWT, and learn.

Now, a request.

During the last year, Charles Rotter aka Charles the Moderator, has been mostly keeping WUWT running with the help of guest authors, such as Eric Worrall, David Archibald, Bob Tisdale, Willis Eschenbach, David Middleton, Kip Hansen, and others. Charles did this so that I could get my own life and business back together, after several years of loss followed by the CampFire and all the mess that entailed.

I’d like to reward him, since he’s done this without any remuneration at all (despite persistent false claims we have “big oil” backing) and so I’d like to ask our readers to consider making a donation to WUWT, on his behalf for his year of solid work.

Thank you for your consideration.

If the button above does not work for you, try the one at the upper right on the sidebar.

Thank you, all of you. My sincerest best wishes for a happy and prosperous new year!

-Anthony