Outage
Sorry everyone if you came today and found the site down — I’m out of town and didn’t note the site problems until now. We’re back up, though I’m not sure what the cause was and how to prevent it in the future, and don’t have the tools to look into this in detail until I’m back.
Bans
First comment bans today. While I have to say that I didn’t hope that we might see conversations as intelligent and civil as they’ve been, I’m still a little sad I put the blocks up. No big thing though… carry on.
Comment auto-closing, etc
To prevent abuse by link spammers (who like to go through old, unlikely-to-be-noticed posts and post links in comments there), I’m going to be implementing something this weekend that automatically closes commenting on posts after x number of days. If you notice anything go wonky, drop us a line.
Also, I’m going to try something cool with the categories, which has the potential to be catastrophic. I’ll try to do that when you’re all sleeping and not paying attention.
Site-by-category
I noted today that the index-by-category functionality doesn’t always work when you want to view-only-Mariners-stuff, bypassing posts like site information and off-topic ranting (this in replying to the first jerk of the comments — I’m relieved we got that over with). I’m looking into it, but it appears that for the exceptionally large “Mariners” category it’s timing out. I’m investigating. Being able to let users view baseball-only content if they didn’t want to hear us rant about 0ff-topic stuff was an important reason we made the switch.
In the meantime, the money-back guarantee for all site-related problems applies: if you’re unsatisfied with the performance of USSM, we’re happy to refund your money back to you.
Links updated, etc
I’ve finally caught up updating the links from what we had on the old USSM site. I uh… I haven’t entirely worked out how to get sorting to work properly: it was just a list in the old days, and now it’s all in our super-cool database and generated each time you load the page, which means I’ve got some more work to do to get that up and tweaked.
And thanks for the suggestions on what we could do: I’ve got a list I’m trying to work through, but I appreciate the emails and comments.
Linking up and site warning
Service bulletin: I’m going to swap over to the USSM 2.1 template tonight, so if you log in and see the page all half-gussied up, apologies in advance for any inconvenience. Here at the U.S.S. Mariner labs, we never stop innovating… for you!
Also, I’ve finally gone through and gotten us up to date on the M’s blogosphere. A bunch of new ones, and a lot of dead ones pruned. Here’s how it went:
– updated recently (like, say, the last two weeks)?
– is this blog primarly or mostly about the Mariners, unless we’ve been linking to it for ages anyway, like the Bremertonians?
Otherwise, no link in the M’s blogosphere section. Now… this means that I skipped some that I like personally (like Bob Mong’s, for instance, which sometimes has really good M’s stuff) and may eventually go into another links section. But not right now.
Update 8:50pm: USSM 2.1 template’s up. Incremental changes to follow, but that’s the big one.
Update midnight: I spent way too much time on this this weekend. Last set of changes for the night published, and that’s all for now.
sorry, pardon me, coming through
I’m working on tweaking the template a little to make everyone (and particularly Dave) happier, so the site may look a little… uh… wonky here today.
Hmmm… Dave wanted the boxes behind posts, I’m not so sure it works. I’ll leave it up for a while. Anyway, it looks like this is going to require some serious hammer-pounding and general teeth-gnashing, so… I’m going to stop watching the game and tinkering and just watch the game. I’ll do the serious stuff next time I’m up late and there are fewer people around to see the sidebar move around.
Also, in general — part of the problem is that I’m trying to do a lot of CSS tweaking and porting between a couple of different templates we’re using while integrating the stuff that worked off the old USSM blogger template, and it’s far more complicated than I thought it would be. The blogger template was straight HTML, so I didn’t have to do a lot of tweaking. This is a whole other thing.
So bear with me.
And whatever they put in Willie’s water today, can I get some before my games this week? Holy mackeral.
(updating again: I stood up, got a Coke, watched Pudge’s at-bat, worrying they might still lose it, and when Rodrigues hit that ball, yelled “Get to it!” sighed in relief when Ichiro! got there… and tried to drink my Coke, except I’d forgotten to open for… how long did that at-bat seem to last, ten minutes? So I all I got was the refreshing taste of aluminum can. I’ll take the W.)
And we’re up again
You’ll note the page looks dramatically different. This is the second phase of the U.S.S. Mariner improvement program. We’ve moved from blogger. While we complained a little about how slow pages were loading there, etc., one of the other things that was going on was that it was frequently impossible for us to log in to make posts, we had weird problems with double-posting (resulting in the ever-popular “You guys can’t be that smart if you’re double-posting HA HA HA 0wn3d!!” email), etc. Now we’re on WordPress, so we control the tools, the site, storage… and, unfortunately for me, we’re on the hook for our own bandwith, and I’m thinking about shutting boeing.com access off because you engineers can’t stop reloading the page every hour (I’m kidding! Big shout out to the Lazy B!).
If you’re visiting the site this weekend, you’ll see the links built back up as I port those over, and the template will continue to be tweaked into shape.
Comments!
You’ll note I enabled comments but did not launch forums. I decided not to implement forums after I cruised around looking at what other M’s forums were offering and decided it wasn’t worth it. We don’t have the time or resources to moderate forums, and while I had a dream of building a really great Mariner discussion community as part of this project, I just can’t do it. Sorry.
And as long as I’m being open about the rationale behind things, I’m pessimistic comments are going to be up for long, either. At a certain size, it becomes impossible to leave those things open, because you’re too attractive for spammers, trollers, and the like. I haven’t disclosed site traffic sites (and won’t) but we’re past that point.
It is my hope that the exceptionally high quality of our reader base will be reflected in quality of comments and thus will allow them to survive.
We’ll see. There may also be a problem where comments (and the associated cost in having people frequently reload for updated discussions) cost me too much in bandwith.
I’ll keep everyone updated. Back to baseball.