Comment tweaks
Made some minor fixes and tweaks to comments following today’s insanity. Drop us a line if you see anything strange.
Also, in general, if everyone could ease up on the swearing, that’d be nice. Some threads lately have really been foul without reason. If you’re going to swear, make it count, please.
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Site tweaking and comments
Edited: that’s over with, sorry for any inconvenience
USSM stuff
A couple of brief things and a longer one after the fold:
– I’m looking at some possible changes to commenting, like threading and the dreaded registration step. More on that as it happens, but we’re being (we believe) hand-attacked by comment spammers trying to get past that (sometimes annoying) spam-check box that has foiled them entirely since Dave Pease shared it with us. Dave Pease, by the way, awesome, and his generous donation made it dramatically easier to run the site.
– I’m working on fixing a couple of back-end things. If you notice weird site behavior, I’m probably being electrically shocked behind the scenes. Please don’t hit reload repeatedly.
– We’ve been thinking about upgrading our hosting for a while. It would mean much faster response times, better availability, none of the weird database errors you get sometime when Mr. Corcoran posts two different comments at once, causing the server to choke, and so forth. But this requires money, which leads me to…
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Commenting
Probably the most prominant new feature on the blog this year have been the Game Threads that we’ve been posting, and judging by the hundreds of comments each one receives, they’ve been pretty popular. We’re happy to provide a place for everyone to discuss the game as its going on, something of a virtual sportsbar, and we intend to continue posting game threads for the forseeable future.
However, as you’ve probably noticed, the last two days, we have felt the need to close down the threads after some of the commentary got out of hand. The tone of the threads has gotten progressively worse as the team has hit its slide, and multiple posts have had to be removed. Unfortunately, as the game threads have degenerated, it’s meant significantly more work for us in trying to keep an eye on all the comments and eliminating those that fall outside the lines of the comment guidelines.
So, consider this a preemptive strike and a call to raise the level of commentary in the game threads. This blog is not, for better or worse, a message board where you are free to say what you will. There are a ton of places you can go if you really feel the need to attack people and act like a 5 year old, but the USSM comments aren’t one of them. The point of the comments, even in the more laid back game threads, is the exchange of ideas and commentary about the subject of the post.
So, in the spirit of making the threads both more enjoyable to read and easier for us to monitor, here are some things we’re going to ask of you guys that we will enforce to the best of our abilities:
1. Punctuation and some semblance of grammar aren’t optional. Writing four sentences without a period is just painful to read. Don’t use all capital letters. Don’t omit capital letters when necessary, either. This is pretty basic grammer, and while it may seem pedantric, it’s a basic fundamental of communication. You are posting for thousands of other people to read. Make it easy on them. Punctuation isn’t exactly time consuming to add to your comments.
2. Personal attacks will get your posts deleted. It doesn’t matter who they are aimed at. Whether it be someone in comments who said something you don’t like, one of us, someone on the team, you don’t have the right to impugn anyone else’s character. You can disagree with their point, but when it crosses the line to discussing their qualities as a person, your posts will be removed.
3. This is more of a suggestion, but when responding to a comment from a previous post, it is often a good idea to quote a portion of the thought you’re responding to. I prefer the italics method personally, but your mileage may vary. If you’d like to make it easier to people to see what you’re responding to, use the html tag of emphasis, which is “em” followed by “/em” offset by <> on each line. So, it’d look like < .em>quoted material here< ./em> (without the ., which I used just to get the actual tags to show on the site). This isn’t required, but I figure some of you guys may find it helpful.
Basically, what we’re asking is that you make our job easier and improve the quality of the comments in the threads. Don’t inflame others, don’t attack people, and make your comments easy for other people to read.
Edited to add a primer on a few html tags that work in wordpress, as requested in comments
All of these have the same < ...>text< ./...> format.
Bold: strong-/strong
Italics: em-/em
Block quote: blockquote-/blockquote
To link to another webpage, use the following: < .a href="http://www.pagehere.com">description of page< ./a>. As before, omit the periods.
Signing off
I’m packing up the computer and we’re leaving tomorrow morning. I want everyone to place nice while I’m gone (which’ll be at least a week). Go M’s.
— Jason
Post-per-page fixed, sort of
You’ll note that on any page, search or otherwise, you’ll get served up the six posts closest to your query, but at the bottom of the page you can go to the next six, and from there… so on and so forth. I’m going to clean up the formatting when I have a chance, so let that go for a day, if you would.
Much thanks to Alex King who, like many USSM readers, is far more generous with his help that is reasonable.
The issue with short archives
Some of you have noted that clicking on a monthly link only gets the top 6 from that month.
Essentially, in the old version of WordPress, we could control the archive results and the front page size differently. Now we can’t — setting it to return 30 days of stuff for the archives means 30 days on the front page and we’re out of bandwith and dead. Setting it to, say, six posts means that if you want to go back through last month, you only get six posts worth returned from the link.
Sorry. I don’t know how to fix this yet.
WordPress update problems update
This post is of no interest unless you’re a WordPress user/admin or, possibly, happen to have helpful knowledge of the system. Or you’re extremely bored and have already read everything on all the cereal boxes in the house.
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Progress, of sorts
New version of the old template that works on the new version’s up and appears to be working. So everyone can stop throwing fits over the up-for-ten hours temporary version.
I’m still working on tweaking stuff out, and again — please don’t complain that anything’s not working until Sunday, which is my estimated time to complete slogging through all the really small issues remaining.
Though, in a happy coincidence, I seem to have broken commenting, which means you can’t complain about comments being broken. Maybe I’ll fix that last.
Read on if you’re curious about WordPress upgrade stuff, since I know some of you are. Warning: foul language ahead.
Upgrade afoot
No, not to our hosting. That would be expensive. No, I’m going to be upgrading the site’s software here. If you notice anything amiss, that’s why. Please don’t email me until Sunday. In the event that we have any extended outages (beyond 6h), your account will be credited a pro-rated share of your monthly subscription fee.
After that, it’s likely the site will behave in a wonky fashion as I attempt to get it configured while [name omitted] tries to work out hours of pent up frustration from not being able to comment, slowing the server to a crawl. Bear with me.