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[meta] No blog posts in March and April

Juha-Matti Laurio [PersonRank 10]

Thursday, May 5, 2011
13 years ago56,726 views

There is now new Blogoscoped posts since end of the February. Let's hope this is not the future of this blog.

James Xuan [PersonRank 10]

13 years ago #

Looks like it, Philipp has moved on to new things and we can't blame him for that. I will miss this site though, when I was growing up it was always the first site I checked when I opened a browser

David Mulder [PersonRank 10]

13 years ago #

[put at-character here]James Xuan: Same here a bit, no clue why I like this site so freaking much, but I still come back despite knowing nothing new will be up (like a number of times each day :S)...

As I suggested a couple of times it would be a great thing if a number of the most active members would be given admin rights and would blog once in awhile... at least that way the site wouldn't be lost.

Juha-Matti Laurio [PersonRank 10]

13 years ago #

And there is no blaiming against Philipp!

Juha-Matti Laurio [PersonRank 10]

13 years ago #

Ehh, *blaming* I mean

James Xuan [PersonRank 10]

13 years ago #

That would be pretty cool, I have always wanted to write articles and things like that, what I always liked about this blog is that it Asa mo than just the same news everyone covered, there was original stuff and articles covering interesting stories or details that weren't necessarily "news"

Juha-Matti Laurio [PersonRank 10]

13 years ago #

One of the best features of this blog is missing categories and tags – and no need to register. And nothing connections to Facebook, Slashdot stories etc. I dont't like to Like here :)

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

13 years ago #

Thanks guys. At the moment, I can't imagine restarting at the old speed and with the old setup. Not because I don't enjoy blogging, but because right now I'm also really enjoying the work at http://versuspad.com (new projects there are in the works right now, it's almost all I'm doing work-wise all day). As for other setups, I'm open to that. Admittedly, I never seemed to have managed to get a true multi-user editing going... there was a time when there were several people who could write posts. Albeit the blog posts in their way were really multi-user "generated" anyway thanks to all of you. One thing that I'm still contemplating is putting the forum on the frontpage.

Hmm.

Juha-Matti Laurio [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

What is the situation now? Yes, there is a holiday season starting (and started already!) but what about posting one post per month to prevent the main page dying. And I'm not adding a smiley because I don't want to see this blog closing...

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

Without a credible plan to address the spam, I don't see how the site can be saved from decline.

WebSonic.nl [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

I'm sorry but with no blogposts and the spam in the forum I'm affraid that the website is slowly dying.

David Mulder [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

At the very least a real captcha could be added rather than the current one (which bot's can easily solve). Even encoding the HTML showing the mathematical equation might be enough.

George R [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

Maybe people in the know could add seventeen to their answer.
Other submissions may be delayed or need more scrutiny.

Juha-Matti Laurio [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

How ironic that this thread has spam older than 14 hours too. It is a good start to remind moderators :)

Juha-Matti Laurio [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

What about enabling a question to every posting and accepting that number xx mentioned by George from trusted forum members? And implementing this within days.

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

Distributed moderation would be good. Each new post would appear with links labelled "Great post" and "Poor post". If 5 or more of the first 10 votes are for "Poor post", the post gets auto-deleted and no-one else sees it.

I implemented something like this for one of my sites and it works well.

The links would be Ajaxified so that there's no page refresh or other disincentive for people to moderate.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

For what it's worth, some years ago I had tried to turn the blog frontpage into more of a multi-author thing, especially for my holidays, but somehow I didn't manage to get it to work the way I had imagined it, with frequent postings. The forum was always great for casual posting, and then I could form a blog post out of this with additional images, research, rewording, perhaps fact-checking. One thing that helped keep the fire alive was constant daily care, programming optimizations, moderation, blogging, including the help of co-editor Tony Ruscoe and of course all moderators here. Everyone produces the heat, but sometimes it just needs the guy to make sure there's always new coals being put in the grill :)

If you guys feel the forum is now in decline too – the blog frontpage stopped being updated already, as you can see – I can, of course, close it down before the negative feelings (like spam) overwhelm the positive feelings (great news posted by all of you here). I feel that we can continue our friendships in all the many places of the internet, like Google+, Gmail, Friendfeed and more. I feel there are new and more ways to fight the spam here – this was always a very open forum by design, but could be made much more protective with additional work – but for me the bigger question is if this place can survive without some type of daily "super admin/ editor" care.

Yes, perhaps I should soon come to a conclusive decision!

Please give your feedback guys. I always love the community spirit of this place!

George R [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

Philipp:
"... I can, of course, close it down before the negative feelings (like spam) overwhelm the positive feelings ..."

Before closing the site you might consider two other options.

Option 1:
Only permit white listed people to post to the forum. A large susbset from the personrank list might be a good start.
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/personrank.html
Since user names can be forged there would need to be some other form of authentication such as IP address, cookie, or password..

Option 2:
Let someone else run the site. They could clean spam, write blogs, and update software. If they can not do it all they could delegate the tasks to others.

David Mulder [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

Hmm, I definitely agree that it would be a waste to close down this site, I mean, this site was for years _the_ best source of info on Google, it even was first to break the news on chrome back then :P. Another option which wouldn't require so much work is to take a ready made forum software and install it... although I think that too would be a waste and would rather see option 2 which George mentions happen. And I really think he is right that we all could help a bit here and there.

Ludwik Trammer [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

I think there are planty of people here who would care to post on the blog one in a while and keep it going (me included – as you know).

hebbet [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

i am one of the "moderators" and it is not so easy to delete comments as you might know from wordpress. so i usually only delete a few.

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

Here's an example of the value of this site. Take a look at this recent Google Analytics graph of one of this site's pages:

http://i52.tinypic.com/1p8avl.png

Can you guess what the page was? It was Philipp's tremendous interview with Aaron Swartz, who was recently arrested for trying to liberate some public domain documents.

It would be a real shame if content like that became lost:
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-05-07-n78.html

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

Thanks Roger, I didn't even spot that peak myself.

By the way, I always tried to set up this blog so that its content would not "rot" too quickly: I didn't use external image hosting, I tried to quote relevant parts, and I tried to make screenshots accompanying posts (as the links to external sites *are* rotting, in big numbers over the years). I have currently no intention of ever removing any of the archived posts.

Juha-Matti Laurio [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

But what happened since May, it is not a major months of holiday season, the amount of spam has grown since May and no new blog posts are out?

Tomi Häsä [PersonRank 5]

12 years ago #

Thanks for this thread. I haven't visited this website daily, so today when I checked it I thought the blog is just broken. Great news during the years!

Juha-Matti Laurio [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

No blog posts in May, June, July, and August.

Juha-Matti Laurio [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

[moved]

Why all posts since March are from *20%*, you know what is the meaning of this 20...
Where are all of those Google-topics?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

Juha-Matti, you are perfectly correct, the logo and sub line doesn't fit anymore at the moment on the front-page – it fits on the archive pages and the forum, but for new posts, I cannot see myself regularly blogging about Google these days, as I mentioned before... as you probably know, I'm currently doing iPad games & related apps the whole day.

Juha-Matti Laurio [PersonRank 10]

12 years ago #

Hmmm, this thread has 3200+ page loads...

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