Changes to the Site
There are going to be a number of changes to the Belmont Club intended to improve it.
- Expandable post headers, in which only the summary of a post will be shown on a page into which the reader can drill down.
- Last and most far reaching is an end to unmoderated comments. This is a major change with both good and bad prospective effects. The hope is that it will cut down on noise, principally in that it will encourage posts which, rather than being a couple of phrases long, are with any luck, fairly considered replies. The downside is that because I won't be available to approve comments at all times the flow of the narrative will suffer. There is no way around paying this price. The back and forth will suffer. But the expectation is that commenters will adjust and that it will be win-win by and large.
- I'd like to encourage all the readers (and commenters) at the Belmont Club to start their own blogs. It's a better platform to expound on your views and by using the trackback links feature, keep the dialogue going, perhaps not as spontaneously as before, but possibly in more depth.
- There are a bunch of other interface enhancements I am looking to implement. Please don't hesitate to email to suggest changes.
posted by wretchardthecat at 6/07/2006 12:00:00 PM
41 Comments:
Wretchard, these are all excellent suggestions. You recommendation about people starting blogs is an especially good one. I, as you know, do have a blog and on it I have a category that contains a few of my longish replies to Belmont Club posts.
It might be nice if people follow your suggestion and not only set up blogs but also create a category, if possible, for Belmont-inspired posts and, of course, link to them so that they are easily accessible from Belmont blog.
On a related note, several times I have linked to Belmont posts but have never seen the link appear at the bottom. Not sure why this problem persists but I'll keep trying to figure it out.
Again I commend you on the decisions to revise the site and end unmoderated comments.
keep up the fine work!
thoughtfully,
starling
I think the "headers only" interface is better. Some bloggers, like Joshua Marshall, if memory serves, actually attempt to use the readers as some kind of "hive mind" to research things.
But the Belmont crowd isn't as homogenous I suspect, so there isn't the prospect of using it as a posse.
The problem I'm going to have is moderating comments. There's a fine line between keeping quality and dampening creativity. Well, we'll see how it comes along.
If it works, don't fix it. There is a magic to good design. You do not have to understand how something works to feel the results. The structure of this site has worked because of the lack of tinkering by the landlord. The site did not succomb to egomania such as Powerline or the sheer incoherence of many others. The host presents some remarkable subjects and insights, throws them on the table and returns at times to tidy up or change the menu. The site is not preachy and the dialog mostly interesting. There are some stalwarts who tend the fires when the guvnor tends to other affairs and the pace of subjects is pleasantly unpredictable. But people cannot stand prosperity and we need to suffer through new and improved. Where my grandparents lived was a lovely old pub called the "Fir Trees", Not the prettiest, but one of the most congenial and intelligently designed for what it was meant to be. Have a drink, a smoke and some intelligent conversation, and some not so intelligent, but on human terms a marvel. One day it was thought it would be a good idea to put in some new innovation and slowly the Fir Trees disappeared. Fixed but not forgotten. I hope in your attempt to moderate the comments you don't skim the cream and end up with Belmont Lite.
A plethora of Belmont Club satellite blogs (kind of a distributed comment system) won't be a viable solution -- it will be as chaotic as the comments but without the flow they provide.
My counter-suggestion is a fairly small set of group blogs -- respectable commenters could make their voices better heard by forming groups worth listening to. Obviously the ones which focused on being worth the reader's time would be most successful.
Does Blogger support group blogs adequately for this purpose?
One reader is concerned about the extra click that it takes to navigate to the interior page of the post, plus the overhead required to navigate out to the main page again. The alternative is to leave all of the post on the main page and to use code to hide and unhide the bulk of the post.
For people with a slow dialup connection, the hide/unhide system is probably better because the page is loaded the first time and the processor just works to alter the display.
I will probably go this route later today.
i think things were fine as was. those that want to commment can. i usually just read your posts.
After 11 million visitors, something's gotta change.
Good luck
The results will be much like those obtained by the improved "new Coke", though,
me thinks.
wretchard, your clean clear uncluttered page view is great and expandable post headers will only make it more so. I'm not sure how the comments column will change the tenor of your blog, but I agree that some comment strings here, and at other popular blogs like LGF, are so full of insider stuff that the casual reader like me loses interest.
Wretchard, you can always retreat if experience dictates it makes sense.
So far as comments are concerned, is it possible to distinguish between newer or untrustworthy commenters and those for whom some degree of reliability has been established? The former could scoot right through and the latter could be passed through once checked. After establishing themselves as reliable, you might change their status.
If there's going to be moderated posts I think there should be a policy page describing what makes a good post and what kind of post will be refused.
After the first fifty responses or so there is a tendency for the threads to go off-topic, for various reasons. Among the reasons is that many of the belmont denizens like to discuss "things" with other belmont denizens but there is only the current thread context at any time to discuss. At lgf Charles has a lot of open threads. The lgf style though is heavier on discussion and lighter on analysis than belmont.
At any rate open threads at times would be one way to allow off-topic discussions without affecting the current topic.
Give it a go, W! I always thought they couldn't improve on carne asada - and then I discovered machaca!
Liked sbw's suggestion, but don't think it can be done on Blogger.
Let 'er rip!
Expandable comments = Boo! Hiss!
Give me the full posts!
I have no problem with the new comments policy. In fact it has given me an excuse to resurrect my old blog Storming Jericho (which I recently shut down for lack of time to write new original material). I've brought it back and reinvented it as a dedicated vehicle for responses to other blogs, including Belmont Club.
I also like the expandable/collapsible post idea (even if it was stolen from Winds of Change ;-P ).
Good idea. The extra clicks are not a problem and moderating comments should actually make the comments more accessible.
Makes more work for Wretchard, though--and less time for writing new stuff.
Wretchard,
You might want to look at capturing a few of your commenters as comment reviewers. That way you won't have to babysit each comment - like C.S. Scott at SecurityWatchTower chose to do.
Maybe list them as in a listbox on the left. Not really diarist, but just folks who would get the full list of comments and could accept or deny comments when they are on a post. There are some out there that would review the comments for content and not political or ideological format.
You could then review the reviewers... Or, provide a means for readers and commenters to annotate pleasure or displeasure with coment reviewsers - like EBay.
Don't know if that is possible in Blogger. But, with 11 million hits you might have some clout - even with Google.
First, it is your blog; do whatever you want with it. Don't feel that you need to do anything for us. Your blog is too good already: we are not worthy.
That said, what I would do if it were my blog would be to put a link to the comments policy in the template and, in that policy, I would state that comments are not only moderated but that only a small number will be approved. Commenters would be advised to regard the comments they enter as personal (but not private) notes to the moderator which may rarely be shared with other readers in the comments section if they are especially insightful. Commenters would be encouraged to post a copy of any long comments in their own blogs, linking to the Belmont Club item, and to look for their comments, and those of other commenters, in the "Links to This Post" section of the Belmont Club posting.
Interesting Change.
I would suggest including the first three lines of your body in the front page.
I tend to ignore the titles of posts, and look at the first paragraph to decide if I want to read - I also look at the first few comments - and the last comments to decide if I want to read things in detail.
It will take some getting used to as I read very fast and multi-task so this requires more clicks.
Moderation is a good step. You can delegate this task to a a Beyesian Bot, BTW - combined with a workflow - or just enlist someone.
I think you should consider following what I thought was the original idea behind the Belmont Lounge and provide a link to an associated site where more detailed and perhaps even somewhat OT disussions could be held between fewer people.
You could even say "XXX and YYY why don't y'all take that over to the Belmont Lounge and expand on it as required." This is a common technique in technical meetings and even in Amateur Radio nets.
Anyway, keep up the good work!
A vote against, on both changes. Whereas the home page used to be readable at a glance, with scrolling, it now requires clicks and backs and forths. Blech.
Were Belmont club an aggregator, where the title of an article determined whether one was going to read it or not, this change might make sense. However, I (and I assume most folks) read every workd Wretchard writes. The new layout only makes this harder.
ALso, the home page looks almost sterile now, and at first glance doesn't indicate the quality of the writing here; just a bunch of headlines.
As to the comments, I agree with the prior commenter; the at-times rapid-fire flow of the comments adds to the character of the site. Don't fetter them.
Trying to run a blog of my own for less than two years has deepened my respect for the consistency and excellence of Belmont Club. To do even a half-assed job just writing the original posts takes an enormous energy investment.
Bill Whittle for a time enlisted an old friend to assist in moderating comments. This might be a useful arrangement, but it depends on a special consonance between the Blog owner and any such disciple.
It might be useful to devote some post to a discussion of the function of COMMENTS. Maybe a sidebar with suggestions, guidelines, links to html help, etc.
My personal peeve with comment streams is the distraction of two or three commenters using the bandwidth to slag each other off, rather than take their fistfight offline.
From Wretchard's point of view, it has to be a wearisome burden simply scanning all the comments to weed out spam and truly actionable obnoxious garbage.
I would read Wretchard's essays even without the comments, but it is exactly the high-nutritional content of his posts that brings out a correspondingly high-quality in many of his "correspondents."
In medieval times (so I've read) the great minds of the era exchanged letters, books, news, and ideas by regular posts. Last century, it was enormously popular for celebrities such as Lincoln and Mark Twain to LECTURE before the hoi polloi. In the alleged "modern" era in which the MainStream News Organs have abandoned their original mission, blogs such as Belmont Club serve the same function, with the added benefit of allowing us mere mortals to witness and, if we behave, add a bit to the conversation.
Thanks, Wretchard, for sharing so much of yourself with us. I'll be looking forward to seeing the new changes.
Readers come here to access and absorb your insights. That is the primary benefit sought and obtained by your customers. Luckily, formatting cannot seriously affect the quality one way or another, not in this sense.
The derivative value of the Club is the comment thread. Here, formatting and gate-keeping can have a qualitative impact on the site. Administerial techniques can carry a good blog into greatness by eliminating the waste of noisy comments.
But there are trade-offs. Multiple posts a day raise the overall quality of the Club but diminish the value-add of the comment thread. Some commenters with high signal-to-noise ratio visit less than others, and conversations can be over or abandoned before they have a chance to offer their input. Running four or five parallel conversations is great for the reader, but difficult for the commenter. Commenters--and here I'm projecting--want to be read, and a quality post takes some time to compose. If by the time a comment is ready the conversation has moved to the third tier, the payoff will have diminished and over time that comment will not be written.
And yet, multiple posts and parallel subjects constitute a net gain in value, regardless of the loss of comment dynamism--especially considering the erosion taking place in that arena anyway. Satisfaction is found in the post, not the thread, and these changes merely reinforce it.
Wretchard:
looks like your comments box is working again. I like the look. Hope that the comment moderation thing works out.
Wretchard,
I remember at the old site, the comments used to appear before their author. I had some fun reading the comment while guessing who they were. There were some unmistakable styles and messages that were always woven into the thread, no matter the context, and it was easy to distinguish many of the commenters.
There was a moment where the blogosphere reached an apogee of sorts during the turning points in history and I expect that with your guidance, The Belmont Club will trace out those arcs many times to come. Recently, with the future of OEF, OIF, and the WoT so uncertain, and such political ambiguity all around, it seems that the comments here have devolved into something of a free for all, with competing memes that, not infrequently, no longer resemble the thread or the context of the discussion. I have noticed also that the tone has been changing. Not just here but everywhere. At least that is my perception.
I read your blog for a year before I even ventured a comment. Not before long I felt compelled to comment regardless of the topic and weigh in as a matter of habit, sometimes rush to comment before I even finished reading your post. It says something of the power of this thing, this club you have created and I hope that you can appreciate how deeply most of us respect you. I used to mess around with BBS’s back in the bad old days. Was hooked on DrudgeReport for the longest time. Read the National Review religiously and used to forage through WorldNetDaily. Through your blog was made aware of the WindsOfChange, BillRoggio, and many others.
I hope that you can find the right balance between making your site an enjoyable read for all comers and still maintain a little of the vacuum of chaos that this site has always fostered.
Best Regards,
AM
Wretchard, don't feel that you need to post many items per day. Save your best thoughts and keep them a day apart. Those of us who find your perspective to be interesting (interesting plus one) do not need daily little snippets.
Please, stay with the big picture and keep focusing on quality.
Like Starling and others, the Baron and I are Belmont progeny...our comments needed to go find a home of their own, just as mouthy kids need to do eventually.
When I first commented here, I used another name. Seems like a lifetime ago...and then, realizing we were taking up too much bandwidth here and needed to strike out on our own, Gates of Vienna was born, along with our new identities.
Nahncee said once that three paragraphs was probably the courteous limit for commenters. I think she's right. So Do Whatever You Want, Wretchard, we readers will be following behind. Even Doug.
(4th para, sorry) I like your feature of dividing story/commentary. Sometimes I start with the commentary and then read the post...hope you continue that.
No Nudes?
Habu1 has not met Sonia, has he?
It is always a Good Thing to make the most of the screen geography ... the Least Common Denominator of Paying Attention. Expandable Headlines are LCD solutions, economical, Great for Readers.
I wonder if this is the Break Up of the Belmont Club?
I always thought the coolest thing about the Belmont Club was Prof. Wretchard delivering his shimmering Poetry/Philosophy Blog-chords.
And then a lot of murmurs from the lively crowd in the "Belmont Club" of ASCII character crowds.
+ + +
Prof. Wretchard will become our Writing Teacher, sharing our posts as befits his glorious vision?
Such a Load our noble Wrtchrd bears! I'd hate to have to read so many posts. Ugh.
+ + +
Hope to see you all on the other side!
Tony
Red River sez: "You can delegate this task to a a Beyesian Bot, BTW - combined with a workflow - or just enlist someone."
You can only do this if you don't care about losing touch with the human feel of spontaneous, unedited responses.
Even InfoRetrieval blades that bring back original sentences or phrases from source HIT documents still don't accurately tell you what the Author meant. Snips lack context. You might be looking at sawdust from a totem pole.
That's the "Belmont CLUB" aspect we are afraid we might lose.
I would greatly prefer the expanded version. Isn't there some way you can give us the option of both formats, selected as we wish?
There's a fair number of readers who don't like the moderated comments or the headers only interface. If the consensus is that there's no significant net gain then I'll consider going back to the old interface.
Alternatively I could go back to the old formatting style but keep the moderated comments. Or ditch the moderated comments and keep the collapsed post format style. What's best?
I actually think the quality of the comments has improved, probably at the cost of spontaneity. And it's a hell of a workload. I'd like nothing else than to leave the comments unmoderated. Saves work.
The idea of having a volunteer moderator might work a while, but it would be unfair to impose this on anyone. The scheme to enrol members into a "group" blog has some attraction, but again, we lose spontaneity and get into groupthink.
All in all there's no free lunch.
(Repost. Previous comments appears to have been lost.)
Pesonally I think that the headline/lede format leads an author towards a sensational heading in an effort to draw the reader into clicking and a drill-down.
I prefer to scan and look for interesting sub-topics / pictures / shiny objects /(hey! balloons!) and read the post based on my current level of interest vs. free time at the moment. FWIW.
You know Wretchard, this discussion was necessary and it helped everyone think about what it is that works here, especially you. You need a life as well and when you sleep this thing will get choked. You stretch the globe and the clock. When you moderate the comments, you will have to do it as often as possible or you become sterile as a newspaper. You take away the thing you are best at and that includes not having to do anything. We sit on our part of the planet looking up at the sky hoping to see a shooting star from the Belmont club. We all know what time the sun comes up and it is a nice thing but a shooting star! One other point, moderated comments will lead to people writing what they think you will print, the tone will change, as well as the timing. The way you have it is to this point is live television in front of a tough audience and you may be going to a taped, edited time delayed version. It will be different.
Wretchard
Is there an easy way to search for (my) comments going back a year or two?
Leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq Has Been Killed
By JOHN F. BURNS 4:59 AM ET
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the militant who led an insurgent campaign of suicide bombings, kidnappings and hostage beheadings, died in an air strike north of Baghdad, Iraq's prime minister said.
Video: Officials Announce Death
Photos: Zarqawi's Life Story
Text: U.S. Military Statement
Charles asked: Wretchard, Is there an easy way to search for (my) comments going back a year or two?
Charles, I wondered the same thing. I googled a search string that include the terms "fallbackbelmont", club, and my name (in quotes) and found 64 posts on which I had commented. I am sure if you try a similarly constructed search you'll find your posts.
One thing to note.. you will very likely see this message at the bottom of the search page- "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 2 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."
That last line contains a link in it. Click on it and it should give you all the results, i.e. posts, not just a subset.
Wretchard your writing has meant a lot to me. 9/11 changed my whole orientation (Left to Right) so to understand myslef I must understand where I was at and where I am now; you have great insight into these forces pulling at the world today.
As far as the comments section goes, your commentators respect you enough that if you were to write, "OK everyone this conversation is going off the rails and I am going to give it ten more and then shut down this column's comments" - I believe the comments would get back on track or they would peter out naturally.
Does that sound heavy handed? I know that is not your way but at the same time a little nudge might keep things from goint to chat roomy...
Anyway, thanks and best...
Wretchard,
You could chisel your posts on a stone tablet, float them in a dugout canoe, transmit them via drumbeat, have them transcribed by monastic calligraphers, and finally delivered to my door by muscular messenger. I don't care. It's your words, your thoughts, your inimitable analysis that matters. Only that. As long as I can still read what you write I'm good. It's all good.
The nature of your analysis is typically not time sensitive. Your most important posts are just as relevant today as when you wrote them several years ago. Chronological ordering implies a perishable nature that is not characterisitic of your essays. They would better fit a topical organizational system.
Comments would add the most value if filtered in some way that allows meaningful ideas in but doesn't necessarily stifle dissent. I don't think "comments" is even the right word for what you are seeking. You want thoughful, well researched analyses, response-essays if you will, that expand, balance and argue for or against your ideas to hopefully edify and delight the reader.
How do I search through old posts using keywords now?
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
"Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion."
Dwight D. Eisenhower
We all go off on a tangent, but sometimes those tangents lead to discussions that bear not only greater knowledge but the fruit of the discovery.
In other words, let the fur fly and the blood splatter. Lets have winners, losers and those who just stay to the end.
Even us ol' guys with only an eighth grade education, sometimes can say something worthwhile.
Papa Ray
West Texas
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