Back in October or November I asked you to make contributions to the upkeep and improvement of the site. More than fifty of you chipped in and I bought the services of a programmer who works for Daily Kos. Our progress has been slow, in part because a lot of work is going into rolling out DK4 over at the Great Orange Satan. We were able to get Google Ads to run on the site, and that has begun to bring in some revenue. I wish it were more, but it’s something and it helps. We have also installed the social media buttons so you can share articles here with your Facebook friends and Twitter followers, or share them with Digg, or email them around. I hope you enjoy the change and take advantage of it to help us gain readership. The big problem we still have to tackle is blocking spam accounts and spam diaries. It requires some legwork and a good chunk of time, but we’ll get it done sometime soon.
I don’t really have more money to spend on making other improvements, but I want to know what improvements you’d like to see. I want to ditch the regional threads, since I haven’t updated them since before the last election. And unless we get a lot more diary entries, I don’t see a need for a World Recommend Diary feature anymore. Speaking of which, hey, submit some diaries people.
So, what do other sites have that we don’t have? What would you like to see?
I do rely on your contributions to keep the site going, so please consider making a donation to the Frog Pond. And thanks to all our readers. You are a generous bunch.
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Those were the days –
“You don’t support the troops!” by Damnit Janet
(47 recoms)
BTW Fully agree to “get rid of ‘dem foreigners” and status aparte.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
I think about DJ often & wish her well.
You might check a site named reddit dot com. It might give you some ideas about what you would like your site to do.
Probably easiest if you read something called redditquete or something like that about expected behaviors. People who volunteer to pick up subjects of interest or to monitor discussions.
Strictly a suggestion.
Thanks for your blog. You are a trifle middle of the road for me, but I enjoy your ability to convey your point of view.
I think I enjoy the site because I’d rather spend time with an articulate & intelligent person I may not agree with than someone I’d agree with totally who can’t communicate.
The best thing about BT as far as I’m concerned is its breathing room.
I’m waiting on a big check, Booman and you are on the top of my list of places to send it.
I have no problems with the site, it’s clean, easy to read and has the best damn content around. Well, I often disagree with Steven, but that’s cool.
I thought people usually disagreed with me š
Me, I disagree with the frog.
You have a unique perspective that’s pragmatic and extremely valuable, and you provide insights into the administration’s likely decision-making process that I don’t find anywhere else.
My only request would be more posts from you. š
If you’re thinking about abandoning the regional threads, how about using the space for another focus on national things that interest you besides local politics – like pending legislation that we could contact our reps about, or federal agency hearings, support that activist groups are looking for, a News Bucket etc. etc.
I like the regional threads, it’s very personal. maybe pending legislation connected with regions? don’t really have a well formed idea
I had the similar ideas. I might try something like that. The regional threads never really worked here. So, I worry that the whole idea is bad. But maybe I’m wrong and some kind of issue threads could take off.
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I wouldn’t abandon those separate threads. Perhaps along the line of other suggestions you can make a name change. I’m thinking of the “true blue” states and the “deep red” states. The representatives of both parties face different challenges and issues. Perhaps also Green issues . The world has already started to innovate and profit with jobs along the energy and ecology of nations. Choose the name that is engaging to the reader and wets his/her curiosity. I guess you would get BLUE, RED and GREEN threads. Just a thought.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
Yep, the spam problem does seem crucial. Right now there’s more spam in ‘Recent Diaries’ than anything else.
Would it make sense to create a different requirement for posting diaries than just an account? Either with time spent at the site or with a number of other comments already posted & rated positively?
Just trying to suggest something that you can do administratively.
Also wish to express appreciation to you for creating & maintaining this community. Please continue to do so at least until I’m doing something for money.
I’m still trying to understand the approach we’re going to take. Basically, we’re going to create a kind of profile of a spam account based on a large sample of existing spam accounts. Once we do the grunt work, most spam accounts will be automatically quashed.
But there are other things we can do, like a waiting period to post comments and/or diaries.
You could give TUs the ability to mark diaries as spam and if two or more did so then they could be hidden from view and email notice sent to the administrators.
Is the volume so great that you can’t kill them individually? or just shut down IP adresses so they don’t just create a new address, but have to move machines to do so?
volume is ridiculous, over 100,000 accounts.
If IP addresses are stored per account, I am sure you can destroy great batches of spam accounts because they will be sharing IPs (few spammers, many accounts). If this is not happening now, you should start recording each IP at time of log in, maintaining a list of IPs per account. Banning a handful of IPs might kill 90% of your spam! I was having similar problems and banned about 20 IPs, et voila, problem limited, if not solved.
I totally get the idea of an algorithm to filter them as they are created/make posts, but it is probably more hassle than it’s worth since you are obviously balancing choices between spending on new features versus ‘security’.
Is your host server Linux? IPTables is great for this sort of thing. You just maintain a black list of who can no longer get to your site.
They ebb & flow, like tides. I hope that you keep them, as it seems a small bit of real estate in trade for a window into topics that can really matter!
I like Andi’s idea – quick and easy. A “rate as spam” along with a recommend button. The waiting period would help too.
Yep!
I guess there should probably be a relatively high bar — say, 3 spam ratings — to prevent the kind of nonsense that’s taken place elsewhere because folks are just in a pissy mood.
I’d like to see two things:
And lo the cries of the anguish echoed through the abyss and a great smiting of spam diaries was unleashed across the land