Written By: - Date published: 2:05 am, November 30th, 2008 - 41 comments
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I’ve added two front-end features to the site. Automatic comment closing and a WSIWYG comment editor.
Comments get automatically closed on posts older than 30 days, unless that the post remains quite active. It displays like
The main reason for this update is because a common troll tactic recently has been to drop comments into very old posts. It does no real harm. But it does increase site traffic and is annoying for the moderators because the comments are usually out of context with other dialogue going on. It will also prevent some confusion over posts where people have found them using google, and thought they were current.
The other update is to put a experimental TinyMCE comment editor on the site. This can currently only be accessed by people who have registered and are logged in and have that grey mantle of authority. Users can turn it off in their profile if it causes problems. At present I have no plans to extend its use to people who aren’t logged in because they can’t turn it off if it causes problems with their browser configuration. It looks like this.
To turn it off, go into “Site Admin” in the top right, and then click on your login name in the top right again. Turning off the visual editing flag will turn off the javascript editor. However it may take a while to clear your local cache
The current limitations on the TinyMCE editor are that the BlockQuote doesn’t work (but I’m working on it), and it may have problems with browsers with strong popup controls. I’d have preferred to use NicEdit because it is smaller and closer to the site needs. However it doesn’t seem to want to store the formatting if you aren’t the the sysop 
Let me know of other issues here and I will see what I can do to correct them. In the meantime, I’ll clean up some of the other CSS issues like font size, removing the redundant tag message, and adding it to the reedit.
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Ok – considerable improvement. But enough for the night. Time to see what else has been happening here
[Tane: Hi Dad.]
Made this into a post
Since the 16th I’ve been running an experiment with the Alexa ranking system to look at the site sensitivity in rankings from a single person using it. This is one of the factors used by Tumeke and Halfdone’s rankings. I was interested in how much it affected the Alexa ranking. It has been enlightening…
None of the other admins use this because of its tracking behaviors or they run Safari. The Standard’s score on this ranking had remained moderately static – from Tumuke nz blog ranking
October 226k nz451
September 221k nz338
August 236k nz388
So I added it to all of my firefox’s on the evening of the 15th at home including my work laptop.
Now I spend considerable time pulling pages from The Standard because of the nature of the moderation task – the vast majority of which are admin comment pages. I also have two other page view measures in wordpress.stats and google analytics. Both exclude the admin pages in wordpress.
The google analytics and wordpress.stats showed a steadily decreasing number of page views, as would be expected post-election and as we move into summer.
Alexa now shows a traffic rank of 191k and nz266 rank. As far as I’m aware there have been no other readers starting to use this that read the standard. The rapid decrease started when I started to do my usual operations with alexa running after months of compatitive stability. This happened in about 3 weeks.
It looks to me as if a single person using this can significantly change the traffic ranks at alexa from the sites that they look at. Looks like a good tool to rort the system, especially for a admin of a site who spends a lot of time on their own site.
It does explain a lot of the stepwise changes in the ranking that I’ve seen that do not appear to relate to measured page views. It looks like there are so few alexa users in NZ, that even one reading the site can change the alexa ranks of a site that they read quitre considerably.
I’ll post this over at Tumeke and Halfdone. I suspect that there may be a lot more users of alexa shortly.
Testing blockquote on Safari 3.2.1 on OSX 10.5.6
but i don’t see it on the screen, only after submit my comment
[lprent: Yeah I have been a bit distracted because of my niece playing with the police]
is it possible to get the plugin for my blog in France ?
why i can’t quote the first line ?