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Moderation notes in election year

Written By: - Date published: 1:18 pm, July 27th, 2023 - 4 comments

Some guidelines about current moderation.

Grumpy mod note

Written By: - Date published: 10:21 am, April 9th, 2022 - 28 comments

Please read if you are commenting at The Standard.

Why do we* write Posts on The Standard?

Written By: - Date published: 1:23 pm, February 26th, 2022 - 28 comments

Why come here to comment?

Some notes on moderation

Written By: - Date published: 10:47 am, February 6th, 2022 - 23 comments

A few notes and suggestions on moderation on The Standard.

An outage (in more ways than one)

Written By: - Date published: 1:50 pm, July 11th, 2021 - 22 comments

First off – my apologies for letting the site drop out over the past days. We had several outages, computer and human. The human one was the worst. We seem to have had a few new bugs making the rounds since we bubbled with aussie.

Test embeds in comments.

Written By: - Date published: 8:04 pm, January 3rd, 2019 - 32 comments

As some of you may have noticed, I’ve started testing some embeds in comments in OpenMike today. This is a test to see what is possible in posts that can worthwhile be carried over to the comments. I’ll probably make decisions on what I allow over the weekend and either add what you want or remove the ones that look like they will break the conversation.

Now on WordPress 5

Written By: - Date published: 12:59 am, December 30th, 2018 - 12 comments

Just upgraded to Wordpress 5.02. There were a couple of minor tweaks required on our site for old posts, but nothing earth shattering. Proceeding on to changing the theme after 8 years.

Fairs fair : how to complain, how not to and why not

Written By: - Date published: 10:10 am, May 16th, 2018 - 21 comments

Phil Quin has been his usual dickheaded self on the net. Trying to bully people about material that they probably didn’t write on this site is not a way to get it looked at. For that everyone need to follow the procedures detailed in our contact page and the pages linked to it. The alternatives aren’t nice. Ask Dermot Nottingham. Updated

Nearly time for the Bionic Beaver

Written By: - Date published: 12:18 pm, May 5th, 2018 - 10 comments

Like everyone these days, I live in a range of widespread cultures. There are always interesting shock effects when one culture runs into another. Like the Bionic Beaver…

An Introduction: Matthew Whitehead

Written By: - Date published: 2:23 pm, October 25th, 2017 - 39 comments

A brief introduction to a new contributor.

Women readers of the site

Written By: - Date published: 11:25 pm, September 18th, 2017 - 49 comments

Apart from the usual election year rise of the readership, the demographics on this site have been moving a lot earlier this election. The most noticeable statistic in the recent months has been to do with gender. Most of it appears to me to have been associated with female interest in Metiria Turei. There is a lot more interest by women in this election than in 2014.

A personal view of a decade of The Standard 2.0

Written By: - Date published: 8:18 am, August 25th, 2017 - 43 comments

With the distraction of the a looming election, one that is likely to ditch the dead hand of National’s cronyism on our economy and society, I missed that we’d managed to make this site survive and thrive for a decade. I think that deserves some recognition …

Offline this morning for a short time

Written By: - Date published: 8:55 am, June 6th, 2017 - 9 comments

Updated: The server will be shifted when its network link gets shunted to a new location. That will happen sometime Wednesday. So the site will be offline when it does as I have to physically pick up the server and reconnect at the new location.

Completed

Dirty Politics done in the Netsafe style.

Written By: - Date published: 9:29 am, March 30th, 2017 - 48 comments

I just got sent a notice of complaint from Netsafe under the HDCA (Harmful Digital Communications Act). It appears to me that Netsafe still either hasn’t read the act or that they are cooperating with the perpetrators of Dirty Politics. Either way, I don’t have time to deal with people who don’t put in the information required by the act for me and the unknown author to make a decision. Updated

1.2 million comments

Written By: - Date published: 6:01 pm, February 5th, 2017 - 7 comments

We just hit 1.2 million comments published. I noticed by accident!. Typically it was on politics

Upgrades again and readership growth

Written By: - Date published: 8:46 am, July 22nd, 2016 - 17 comments

Operating system upgrades this weekend. We should get a bit of a speed improvement.

But for all of those new readers (nearly 70,000 of you in May) who haven’t suffered maintenance and failures taking your reading away, if the site goes offline during this weekend (or any other time), it will return. The site runs on a financial donated shoestring and a lot of volunteered time in technical and writing skills.

I don’t “own” The Standard

Written By: - Date published: 5:20 pm, May 10th, 2016 - 44 comments

Can I point out to the media, Cameron Slater, and for that matter the legal dimwits at the West Auckland site Lauda Finem. I don’t own The Standard. I haven’t even owned the domain name for more than 6 years. I used to own the domain up until 2010. But that was signed over in that year to be the property of The Standard Trust.

A big thank you to IDG from thestandard.nz

Written By: - Date published: 9:52 am, April 16th, 2016 - 15 comments

Why we all, readers and authors, should praise IDG Communications for the generous gift of shortening this sites domain name.

TPPA national day of action

Written By: - Date published: 8:00 am, November 13th, 2015 - 26 comments

Saturday November 14 is a national day of action against the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement.  Details of all protests are set out in the post.

More than a million comments

Written By: - Date published: 10:15 am, November 2nd, 2015 - 56 comments

As at 08:30 NZST 2nd November 2015, we passed having more than a million approved and published comments. It is a little later than was predicted by Eddie back in March 2012, but was a pretty damn accurate estimate given the vagaries of the political cycles.

Argghh! The comment bug

Written By: - Date published: 1:44 pm, October 18th, 2015 - 10 comments

I have spent a few hours been chasing the bug that has been causing people to go into moderation automatically. Found it, killed it, and I thought I’d share it with you.

Standard Changes

Written By: - Date published: 10:05 am, September 30th, 2015 - 190 comments

Nothing to get all het up over…

TPPA Rally – Downtown Auckland, 1 pm TODAY

Written By: - Date published: 1:55 pm, August 14th, 2015 - 65 comments

A reminder that the Auckland TPPA march is on tomorrow at 1 pm starting from Aotea Square.  The US consulate is that worried that it has issued a warning to US citizens!

Radicals, Reformists or Revolutionaries? Ideologies of the Left.

Written By: - Date published: 7:19 am, August 14th, 2015 - 62 comments

James Gluck is doing an academic study of the ideologies that exist on the left. He is asking for those interested to participate in a anonymous online survey.

Sphinx and Rachinger

Written By: - Date published: 7:18 pm, May 4th, 2015 - 24 comments

The search engine on this site is run by Sphinx search. This is an open source general purpose package that runs a scan on the databases amended posts or comments. However it appeared to have caused Cameron Slater to cum all over his brain and shut down even the minimal amounts of animal cunning that he usually possesses.

The end is near for IE

Written By: - Date published: 2:56 pm, April 16th, 2015 - 25 comments

Internet Explorer is now less than 15% of the sessions on this site. However it accounts fro nearly half of the development and testing time for the legacy variants. Microsoft has a replacement in the works, which should get released soonish. But I’m tired of wasting time on a crap browser. I’m dumping it now.

Development of the mobile theme

Written By: - Date published: 2:01 pm, April 4th, 2015 - 61 comments

Last week, very reluctantly, I coughed up the money for a development version of the mobile theme. About a quarter of our readers primarily use mobiles to read the site these days. When you add tablets it gets closer to 40%. I need to create a mobile theme that enhances the existing one for better commenting. If you have simple ideas for that, now is the time to speak.

April fool Pete George released from ban…

Written By: - Date published: 1:53 pm, April 1st, 2015 - 113 comments

Pete George was released from his ban this morning. Something that he was clearly bracing himself for yesterday when he directly lied about this site yet again…

900,000 comments

Written By: - Date published: 9:02 am, March 18th, 2015 - 28 comments

Yesterday morning we went though 900k comments. We have done another 100k comments in 188 days since September 10th. We are slightly behind our long predicted exponential growth to a million comments in August.

Do the young really lack concentration?

Written By: - Date published: 1:23 pm, March 1st, 2015 - 85 comments

Now that I can no longer call myself young, the old adage that younger people simply lack concentration does appear to me to be correct. I look to the numbers on The Standard to see if there is a correlation and if I can argue a causation based on age. Are the younger readers without concentration, or are they just busy…

Damn you readers :) Upgrades again

Written By: - Date published: 7:47 pm, February 10th, 2015 - 31 comments

Well ok, after the election I figured that I could shift the site to some slower storage with a whole lot of redundancy in a RAID6 array of slower drives. We’d have a lot fewer readers than our peak for 6 months after post election, right? Nope – wrong. You are making me work…

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