I’m moving the hosting of The Standard from a server in my living room to a cloud hosting this weekend. There may be some issues. If it works then it will stay there, otherwise The Standare will be coming to you from the deep south for while.
Newbies, moderation, the purpose of the Standard, how things work here.
Some guidelines about current moderation.
Please read if you are commenting at The Standard.
Why come here to comment?
A few notes and suggestions on moderation on The Standard.
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.
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.
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.
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
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…
A brief introduction to a new contributor.
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.
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 …
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
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
We just hit 1.2 million comments published. I noticed by accident!. Typically it was on politics
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.
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.
Why we all, readers and authors, should praise IDG Communications for the generous gift of shortening this sites domain name.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing to get all het up over…
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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…
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…
Martyn Bradbury is still ‘leading’ the left from the behind. My focus on this site is how to reduce all the costs. One of those costs over the last year has been complaints about us from inside the NZLP. That is why I decided last month to drop my membership. Bomber snarkily whining up his ego looks like another wasteful cost.
A number of changes are being considered by the authors of the Standard and the first is a dedicated Facebook page.
I was just having a look through the connections between this site and others (and contemplating how to increase it). I thought others might also be interested.
