One — Some of the feedback we’ve received and, frankly, lamented over ourselves is about the frustration of having your blog comments take hours and sometimes days before they post. Especially now that we have immediacy on the comments after news stories, the technical policy on the blogs inhibits conversation. Obviously, that’s a bad thing. So I’ve been in contact with the corporate technical types trying to fix that problem on these blogs. I can’t guarantee it will happen, but I am optimistic.
This originated as a policy issue, but now that we have the rapid-fire on the stories, it seems to make no sense. Technically, however, there is a challenge. The stories and the blogs use different software. Those who speak out on the stories are registered users. Those registrations don’t translate to the blogs. So I’m trying to make it work with our Moveable Type blog program.
How it would work is that I would be able to mark some of you either as “authenticated” or “trusted.” So if you’ve been lurking for months and don’t comment, but one day get the urge, your comment won’t post right away. If we go with “trusted,” that means we trust that you won’t resort to profanity or some other taboo. If we generally like what you add to the conversations we start here, then we’ll mark you as “trusted.” Everyone else will be a case-by-case basis. I can only think of a couple of you that we’d not add to the “trusted” list.
The problem with just letting everything post is we get probably 10-25 spam comments for every legitimate one. I’d rather have you wait than go through dozens of spam to get to the good ones.
As for when this gets implemented, I’m hoping we can get this started this week. No promises, though.
Two — We have a notification feature on the right side of the screen that allows you to be notified when we post a new entry. More people are getting away from e-mail notification and going to RSS sites such as Bloglines or Netvibes (or maybe some other format I’m unaware of), but if you get the e-mails I have a question. Would you prefer a single notification daily, or would you like us to send you a note every time we post a new entry? Or, would you like me to send multiple notifications, but exclude some of the minor ones, such as the “On Notice” entries? Send me your thoughts in an e-mail at sgardner@kitsapsun.com to weigh in, or leave a comment here and wait hours for it to post.
Email notifications for each blog entry are fine with me, but what I really would like is the ability to post as “The Caped Curmudgeon” and “The Incognito Insulter” on occasion (without recourse from the recipient of the barb) Can you work on that?
Hey Steven, I don’t understand why you don’t make posting to the blog for “registered users” as well? Why does it have to be so open? I mean really, a large majority of the “registered users” who post to the stories are the same individuals who post to the blog. So obviously having to be “registered users” is not inhibiting them in the posting of their comments.