Site Update : Reloaded

To save myself from posting a comment in everyone's blog, here is a quick run down of what happened and  is currently happening:

Upgrade Issues
Due to a freak chance of fate, a hardware issue arose on Monday, about 36 hours after I had posted a minor build update. The first thought in most people's heads (maybe even mine)...."Scott broke the server". So we rolled back the site to its pre-Saturday state and all was good for about 30 seconds. Upon further review, it looked like a NIC was loosing some packets, so we switched to the machines backup NIC. However, it is looking more like it is a router issue, so it is not 100% resolved yet, but it is actively being worked on by the fine OrcsWeb folks.

List of Bloggers
Yes this has been updated and no it is not permanent....sort of.  I am open to suggestions, but displaying 800 to 1400 blogs doesn't make much sense either. The idea is to get the home page size down to a more reasonable number (some people still pay by the byte). Ordering by who posts the most and alphabetically does work as the number of blogs increases. I tried to do it by last updated time, but not everyone has set their time zone setting, so it was still off. At the moment, I simply grab 200 random bloggers. I am open to suggestions.

Moderation and Closed Comments
This is still not full proof and does not fit everyone's needs, but I think it was a very necessary step. A future version of Community Server :: Blogs will enable much better control over who can post comments (and when/etc). However, limiting the surface area was a nice quick fix. I had been spending quite a bit of time every day deleting comment spam bloggers were not deleting themselves. This is likely the reason some of you never saw the problem. I am aware that useful comments do come in after 30 days, but I am confident that the spam to useful comment ratio takes a huge nose dive for the worse with each passing day.

In addition, the UI/UE (user experience) are also far from perfect. I did a tweak the feedback admin page last night and removed the in-line options which seemed to confuse people.

Published Thursday, August 12, 2004 5:57 AM by ScottW
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Comments

# re: Site Update : Reloaded

Thursday, August 12, 2004 11:33 AM by Larry Osterman
Thank you Scott. I apologise for the rough tone of my comment about that particular feature, I was quite frustrated when I wrote it having tried for about 10 minutes to figure out how to get one poor souls comment to show up.

# re: Site Update : Reloaded

Thursday, August 12, 2004 12:02 PM by Scott
No problem. It was one of those things were you needed to take a step back from it anyway. I ended up adding more functionality than I originally planned. Add this to the existing functionality and things can easily get confusing (although it made perfect sense to me :)

I always hated the fact it took three 3 clicks to delete comments anyway. The new form is still a bit on the ugly side, but it should be easier to use since the checkboxes moderate/unmoderate/delete.

-Scott

# RE: Site Update : Reloaded

Thursday, August 12, 2004 12:11 PM by jledgard@microsoft.com (josh ledgard)
For the list of bloggers I might suggest:
1. Show bloggers who have updated within the last X days as an option. Then Sort them like you had before so you don't have to figure out exact update times.
2. Two lists: 1 of the top 50 most visited bloggers over the last X days and another of the bloggers with the most recent posts ala option 1, but nothing too exact.
3. Highlight posts, not bloggers. Have a seperate page for the complete blogger list but just replace that peice of UI with something like "Posts on this page" that will take you to that post. This new UI could also show "Bloggers on this page now".

For Comments:
I really really dislike the 30 day cap on comments. I get a TON of valid comments on older posts through google. I would much preffer an option to "Turn on comment moderation after X days" for each blogger. This way I can allow for free discussion without having to moderation 20+ comments in the imidieate few days after I post, but then I can easily ignore the spam and moderate the trickle of comments to those posts after the X days have passed.

# re: Site Update : Reloaded

Thursday, August 12, 2004 12:13 PM by josh ledgard
Not sure if this went through with the comment API so if this is a repost, please ignore. (I guess the comment API can't notify me if a post is awaiting moderation....

For the list of bloggers I might suggest:
1. Show bloggers who have updated within the last X days as an option. Then Sort them like you had before so you don't have to figure out exact update times.
2. Two lists: 1 of the top 50 most visited bloggers over the last X days and another of the bloggers with the most recent posts ala option 1, but nothing too exact.
3. Highlight posts, not bloggers. Have a seperate page for the complete blogger list but just replace that peice of UI with something like "Posts on this page" that will take you to that post. This new UI could also show "Bloggers on this page now".

For Comments: I really really dislike the 30 day cap on comments. I get a TON of valid comments on older posts through google. I would much preffer an option to "Turn on comment moderation after X days" for each blogger. This way I can allow for free discussion without having to moderation 20+ comments in the imidieate few days after I post, but then I can easily ignore the spam and moderate the trickle of comments to those posts after the X days have passed.

# re: Site Update : Reloaded

Thursday, August 12, 2004 12:17 PM by Fabrice
Thanks a lot Scott for clearing things up :-)

About the list of bloggers: is this list really needed on the main page? I'm not sure what its purpose is there... Maybe you could replace it on the main page by a link to a dedicated page that would contain a directory of the blogs. A dedicated page would allow to display all the information you wish, such as the name, the tag line, a short description provided by the blog's owner, the number of posts, and even allow to sort the list by name or by the number of posts.
My 2 euros ;-)

# re: Site Update : Reloaded

Thursday, August 12, 2004 12:37 PM by Scott
Hi Josh,

Good catch. I saw that on Sunday and have a fix/update ready. With the other server issues I have been trying to make as few changes as possible.

I will post the update tonight when things settle down a bit. :)

Thanks,
Scott

# re:Site Update : Reloaded

Sunday, April 10, 2005 6:42 AM by TrackBack
^_^,Pretty Good!