Readers may recall that on April 10th, I announced that some big changes and improvements were coming to WUWT.
Phase 1 was improving the commenting system, and I think that has been fine tuned now. We did try the comment rating system once again for a few days, but as before, it became a visual annoyance and just isn’t useful. Better to simply rebut bad comments IMHO.
Here is what has changed today.
One of the things I wrote then was:
For example, “Tips and Notes” is going to disappear, to be replaced by a better system. This better system will include the ability for more of our readers to submit stories that make it to the front page. Again, this is to improve the speed and lessen the behind the scenes labor. WUWT has gotten so big, that it is a struggle to manage its upkeep now, so the solution is a smarter story management and comment submission system.
The new WUWT Submit a story system is online now, and is a link from the menu bar at the bottom or the header. It is a two step process now to help discourage auto spam submissions from commercial spammers WUWT had been getting. It consists of a guidelines page followed by a compose and submit page.
There’s a section in the composition page on using HTML tags too, so that you can make your submitted stories better.
I’ve also made it easier to submit manuscripts that don’t translate well into simple web form submissions.
The idea behind all this is to make WUWT more of a community based resource, because our readers are what make it go.
What we are looking for here are two things:
- For news items/other blog posts of interest, provide at least three paragraphs in the story submission so that the reader here can get a flavor of the issue/news, and allow them to click on the link to get more of the story. We get a lot of people submitting nothing more than a single link in WUWT Tips and Notes, and those aren’t useful. Help everyone else out by putting some descriptions of your own plus a couple of fair use excerpts into those story submissions.
- For technical manuscripts, WUWT now provides a submission email address where MS-Word documents can be sent as attachments. See the Submit a story page for guidelines on how to compose such manuscripts in MS-Word. In a nutshell, simple formatting with embedded images is what we need.
We’ll try out and tweak this new submission system over the next couple weeks to see how well it works and adjust as needed. Once fully tested, Tips and Notes will disappear.
Then phase 3 will be coming. More on that later.
As always, thanks for your continued readership – Anthony