Plug-in bounty
I threw the wp-polls widget back up after fixing (I think) the right sidebar today. However, it looks like it’s counting votes but not recording them, though I’m baffled why that would be the case. Maybe it’s using the Mariners mechanism for dealing with fan feedback
for each feedback
{total_feedback_count++;
form_response();
delete feedback;
}
I’ll keep poking at it, though I think my weekend allotment of USSM Labs time is about up. Don’t get mad if you see it up for a second, vote, and then it disappears, eating your vote. Stupid polls.
Anyway — one of the continuing problems we have is that it’s hard to format comments since the quicktags went away, and as a result you get people using [i] to do italics, messing up quotes, all that good stuff. So — if you can find a quicktags plugin or easy way to add plugins to the comments, you get a year’s free subscription to USSM, our public gratitude, and one free off-topic comment of your choice.
And as always, I’m open to hearing about what else would be cool to implement. Except threaded comments.
Open call for sim help
Hey, if anyone knows how to fairly easily automate the running of a ton of seasons in DMB for Mariner-related analysis, can you drop us a line? I’m interested in doing some more work on the team, lineups, and related good stuff, but it’s such a pain to run seasons manually that I’m unlikely to do it unless it can be automated or someone wants to pay me a ton of money for the time and effort.
USSM fantasy interest ping
Hey folks — with the collapse of my long-running Diamond Mind sim league, I’ve been thinking of cooking up something on one of the free services (ESPN/Yahoo/?), using some more realistic measures (no defense, unfortunately) to set up something fairly light-weight… who’d be up for it? Any thoughts on what we should use if it happens?
(and don’t worry if we get like 9k responses — if this happens, participation would be a whole different issue)
New USSM logo
Thanks, Graham!
OMG, someone bought an ad
Hey, so for a while I’ve been screwing around with ads — the Project Wonderful easy-bid thing, we did some Google ads randomly — and nothing made any money. So I signed up for blogads, and wow, today there’s an ad for a hair product of some kind. We put up the “buy us a beer” thing for a while (and got about 40 beers total over two trials).
Anyway, the short version is: we’ve been trying to figure out how to make USSM at least somewhat financially less horrible a venture without plastering the site with ticket scalper ads, and this is the the latest in the long tinkering. We’ll see if it hangs around.
Announcing the mods
Hey all — some time ago, we put out an open call for people to help us with the comment moderation, and I wanted to follow up, because I realized it’s been well over a month. We got a great bunch of volunteers, names you’ll likely recognize from their contributions in the comments: Graham MacAree, Jeff Nye, Mike Snow, and Jim Thomsen. As a group, they’re about 4x more qualified to be moderating comments than I am.
So far, it’s been going swimmingly: I don’t ever log in to see 35 comments in the moderation queue, for instance, and no one’s gone insane with power.
I am happy and grateful to them, and to everyone who volunteered to pitch in, for their help in keeping the site manageable as it grows in fits and bursts.
Comment moderators sought
Hi all — Dave and I are increasingly falling behind in comment moderation. So we’re considering deputizing, to the point where we’d take help if it’s available. We’d like to have kept on top of it, but we can’t, and it’s pretty clear it’s eating into our available posting time, the quality of comment discussion, and it’s increasingly frustrating for the two of us to try and keep up with, which in turn shows with our curtness and short tempers… and only the trolls win if we’re constantly on edge and angry.
So!
If you’re at all interested in the glamorous, exciting world of helping us keep the discussion worthwhile, please let us know.
Bonus points for:
– length of USSM association
– attended USSM feeds
– previous comment contributions
– other endorsements that assure us you’re not going to go insane with power
– knowing why comments that start “off-topic, but” get jumped on and how
– having lots of time on your hands
There’s no pay, but that’s okay, because the hours are terrible. In the future if USSM has a remotely positive income, we’d discuss that, but it’s not. Right now, all we offer is gratitude and what will likely be a horrifying look at what the comments that get deleted look like and the abuse we take for deleting them.
I have no idea how we’d do a selection process if we get multiple responses.
If there are comment rating plugins you’d like to suggest, you can email us about those, too.
Site work
I’m pushing out a new WordPress version. Please report any wonky behavior that recurs for more than a couple minutes to us at ussmariner@gmail.com. Thanks.
10:15: still doing backups
10:30: new files are up, checking
10:45: wonky caching behavior, wheee
10:50: think I cleaned that up
11:10: fixed another couple of secondary issues… looks pretty good
11:20: tags are up. I wonder how this will go. Breaking.
11:30: wow, this thing is fast
12: good thing no once noticed *that*
1:20: done for now
True Tale of Moderation Glory
New user posts for the first time. It’s two paragraphs, one of which is a series of disconnected thoughts on the site and whatever, and the second is “my thoughts on the M’s are: Blowers is… Bloomquist is…” the whole thing badly written, with a ton of spelling errors, weird capitalization, punctuation, whatever.
Gets tossed into the mod queue, right, like all first-time comments in the new world.
Second comment:
“THANKS FOR MODERATING MY FIRST POST! FUCK YOU DMZ!!!”
Which is nice to see when I’m checking in on the site remotely.
So yeah, thanks for stopping by.
Excessive Penalty Week
Hi all. Many people, in email or pulling me aside in person, have complained that the comment threads have really sucked lately, and they wish for the good old days, when… I’m not sure they were ever idyllic, but they weren’t this horrible. However, no one’s got any solutions (have a solution? email us! now! please!)
In the meantime, I’m already tired of dealing with the same OT thread-jackers and people being annoying over the last months. So I declare this Excessive Penalty Week, and consider this adequate warning.