Just a reminder to readers—actually, two reminders.

First: do be aware of how often you post on a thread. “Da Roolz“, or the commenting guidelines, say this:

9.)  Try not to dominate threads, particularly in a one-on-one argument. I’ve found that those are rarely informative, and the participants never reach agreement. A good guideline is that if your comments constitute over 10% of the comments on a thread, you’re posting too much.

I can raise the limit to 15%, but to my mind some threads are being dominated by people who can’t resist posting over and over. This tends to intimidate others who think that “regulars” get preference. I’d prefer you to combine your comments if possible.

Also, be aware that I get several hundred emails a day—so many that I either forget some or don’t have time to acknowledge, much less answer, everyone.  My suggestion is that if you have things to send to me (and I do appreciate links and tips, which inspire many of my posts), please do so only once every two or three days. Otherwise I’m in danger of losing things. The exceptions include errors, typos, and other things that should be corrected immediately.

Thanks!
—Mgmt.

For some reason that I don’t understand, the feature that required commenters to have an approved comment (the first one) before they could comment freely malfunctioned, as the relevant box in the dashboard got de-checked. The result was that a few first-time commenters came over here and dominated a post or two with lunacy.  I think I’ve fixed the problem, but I’m asking readers to email me if suspicious, wonky, or huge numbers of crazy comments appear. Let me know the thread and the commenter.

If you were a first-time commenter who got through without approval, I ask you to read Da Roolz for commenting on the sidebar. If you don’t adhere to them, you’ll be either moderated or banned.

Thank you,
The Proprietor

In response to my own wishes as well as to some good suggestions made by readers, the website designer is still working on this venue. You’ll notice that the banner at the top is larger, the space between the sidebars is wider, and that the text with hyperlinks is less glaringly obvious, being red but not red and bold. You may not have noticed that you can now drag photos from the posts to the desktop, which you used to be able to do but which disappeared during the upgrade. (If you can’t drag a photo that way, simply click on it to make it bigger, and that will work.)

We’re also working on several other suggestions, including putting up the time of posting as well as the date, trying to ensure that the “next post” and “previous post” links are now at the top of each post instead of the bottom, and other things I won’t mention. It’s a work in progress, but I think it’s a lot better than it was.

The most requested feature was that readers wanted a way to edit their comments, and you now have 15 minutes to do so after putting them up, which allows you to fix typos but not alter things in response to stuff that appears later.

Stay tuned, and if you have other suggestions, please put them as comments below. Thanks to the website designer for all the work.

Reader βPer from Canada sent me a tip that’s useful for those who follow this site with an RSS readers (I prefer subscriptions, of course, as seeing the numbers go up is one of my few pathetic pleasures).  Here’s βPer’s note:

I’m writing to inform you of a problem I experienced recently accessing your website posts, its cause and the way I dealt with it.  I think some of your readers may find the information useful if they’ve encountered the same problem.

Unlike most of your readers, I don’t subscribe to your site, because I use an RSS reader to follow all my favourite websites, including yours.  If I subscribed to your site through WordPress, the resultant stream of emails would be redundant and a burden.  I use the Feedly news aggregator (and RSS reader) to read the posts of dozens of websites, all of them via their RSS feeds.  BTW, I click through from Feedly to read each of your posts actually on your website, so you get the page hits just as if I were subscribed.

On Wednesday the 9^th, your posts stopped appearing in Feedly.  The last post I saw was Rescued fox cub befriends his saviors –  the last post you made on the 8^th.  I figured there was a temporary problem related to the site rewrite you’re in the midst of, so I ignored the problem for the day, assuming it would be corrected.  I just manually checked your website the old-school way for the day.

Today (the 11^th), the problem persisted, so I decided to investigate.  Turns out, your RSS feed URL changed subtly.  I’ve had it configured as:

               http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/feed

for years.  Now, it’s:

               https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/feed

You’ve moved to making the link to access your RSS feed secure and private (HTTP -> HTTPS).  That’s a good thing, as far as I’m aware.

To correct the problem and start seeing your posts again in my RSS reader, all I had to do was modify the URL to your RSS feed in my RSS reader’s configuration to include the little ‘s’ before the double forward-slashes.  I couldn’t find a way to edit the URL in an existing Feedly source, so I just created a new source with the HTTPS URL.

I know that I’m not your only reader who uses RSS, and at least one other person has mentioned that he uses Feedly (a very popular RSS reader), so there may be other readers who would appreciate knowing why their WEIT fix has dried up and how to restore it.

If you want to subscribe to comment threads without leaving the “sub” comment that puzzles some new readers, we have a tip from Reader Gregory:

I’ve found that I can now subscribe without leaving a permanent comment on the page like I used to need to do. If you leave a comment, say “Sub”, and then delete the comment, you will still receive the comment-delivery confirmation email that allows you to get updates whenever someone else leaves a comment on the page.

I like it because it leads to a cleaner page and fewer people will ask “What does ‘sub’ mean?”

Our crack web designer has taken a common readers’ (and my) suggestion on board, so you now have the ability to edit your comments.  You’ll see when you post your comment, though, that a little clock starts running beside it. That means you have FIFTEEN MINUTES to edit your comment before it becomes set in stone.

This allows people to correct spelling or grammar mistakes, or fix infelicities of prose, but not to modify comments in light of later comments. That seems like a fair solution to me.

There will be other changes, all of which, I hope will constitute improvements. Stay tuned.

For a possible change in the design of this site—which will be a conservative change as I don’t want major changes in appearance—I’m asking readers to comment below about what features they like and don’t like. I am aware of some of the glitches, like having to fill in your name and email each time you comment, while others I don’t know about (mobile appearance, as I never access my site on a phone). I also know that some of the links that used to be on the right sidebar are broken.  Futher, some people like the new “like” buttons for posts and comments, while others don’t.

At any rate, you have about a day to give me recommendations for fixes as well as features that you’d like to stay. I can’t satisfy everyone’s wishes, but I do want to make the site user-friendly—and the main user is me.  But, while we have a chance, you are encouraged to sound off below.

Thanks!