thanks for your input!

Where is the link for My Comments, which used to be on the right-hand side?  That was quite useful.

It appears that comment ratings have disappeared - true?

Is there going to be some sort of flag indicating that submissions are awaiting moderation?  I can't say I will remember to click the tab at the top very often.

Also - comment posts no longer have titles?

sPh 

PS Autoformatting appears a bit sub-optimal; it is not respecting line breaks. 

Getting the following error when trying to post a reply on an existing thread:

• Validation error, please try again. If this error persists, please contact the site administrator.
• The body of your comment is empty.

I'll agree that My Comments was useful; I myself tended to ignore comment titles, at least if they diverged from the main post's title. I like the new site for one change in particular: ordering options that "stick." It could be my illusion but I'm imagining more text in the column as well, which I wished for. I'm sure I'll get used to other changes or at least know better over time what to suggest. 

 I will say that I used to find on the old page that the list of most recent posts (at right) often didn't match the ones in the main home-page column. I often regretted this, since basically I can to catch up, but at least I had a recourse. And indeed now I see the home page has some posts going back a few days. So let me suggest not trying to strive on the home page too much for balance of contributors at the expense of comprehensiveness. I won't want to hunt around for what I'm missing.

Last, I wonder if I'm following the comment interface correctly. It seems to add space between paragraphs without one double spacing, but that did not appear in preview. I used to hate it that many posts had bounteous space between paragraphs, perhaps from composing offline in html, and it'd be nice to be sure we all (or at least myself) follow the formatting ok now.

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

Okay, I guess I should be above all this, but... where's my karma?  I went from being a moderator with trusted user status to zero karma?  Now I'm sad...

The site is lovely though.  *Sigh*

Having been involved with more site redesigns than I care to count, I know that there are always loose ends to fix up after the launch date. Here are a couple of issues that struck me:

The FAQ really needs to be updated ASAP. It is not clear where one finds anything. I also don't like seeing only the titles of reader postings without the first couple of sentences. A recent one says only "Duh". I realize this is the author's choice, but it's certainly not very revealing.

Have there been no new postings, or does the moderation function not work properly anymore? If one is allowed to moderate (as I was) is there any place to see this without navigating to the moderation panel? 

If visitors need to dig to find reader's diaries this will certainly make people less interested in posting. 

Did the issue of posting an image get resolved? In the old version there was an icon to insert an image, even if it didn't work. Now it is not there at all. Allowing images (like graphs) makes some postings much more meaningful.

Speaking of images, I think the author pix just slow down the front page loading and should be put with their bios. I also thought there was going to be a spell checker.

--- Policies not Politics
             Daily Landscape

The front page does not render properly in the Safari browser in Mac OSX. I've made a screen dump of the mess available here.

not working in firefox for my mac. please fix.

I'm getting the same thing on fireforx 1.5.01 on XP

 With me, however, everythign is readable except that the blog title (headline..) bleeds into the tab-links (The coffee house.. american abroad... warren reports, etc)

Also on the left hand side some of the text from "overheard on blogs bleeds over as well, under boycotts do work there's Nonsense....Idiot and the idiot makes itself known in the body of the text of the main vblog post area. 

Daily Muck will appear in the Coffeehouse; the Book Club button will appear above when it's a Book Club week. Otherwise, look at the Sitemap

I should add that the front page seems to be the only one that doesn't render properly. Only on the front page are the 5 tabs stacked 3 over 2. On every other page I've looked at, they run 5 across.

It looks like there's a line break missing in front of the title "Welcome to the new TPMCafe!"

Perhaps the problem is that on the opening page, the line of tabs doesn't break before the title. The design is superb, although I'll miss that header graphic, the café as a hive of activity.

AFAIK, EasyEditor (or as it's called on the Air America blogs, Rich Text) simply doesn't work on a Mac. I keep it turned off

My reference to the misspelled "discussion" was incorrect. The offending typo is in the hyperlink "Previous discusstion topic."

In the moderation tab, I also see the multiple instances.  I was reviewing a post that had material below the fold. However, I was unable to read the material--I got an "access denied" error when I try to view the next page. 

Did you look at the track tab on your profile?

Did you look at the track tab on your profile

Well, at least I now can reply to a comment; before I got no box to do so. :-)

As I said in a comment downthread, I don't find the track tab very useful at all.

It does not appear to catch everything and it only gives you entire threads you have commented on.  For those it caught, this is not a very efficient way of responding to someone if the thread has 134 comments on it. The red "new" signs are not live links to take you to what's new in the 134 comment-thread. I suppose you could click on your browser search and search for your user name to see if anyone has responded to your own comments. But difficult solutions like this will not foster thoughtful discussion, as it's not user friendly for people who aren't over experienced at navigating around sites, which is most people, and which usually includes very thoughtful and knowledgeable people on topics of interest, busy people with jobs who aren't net addicts. :-) As set up, I still see a lack of access to comments as possibly a real detriment to sophisticated discourse. This is much more like the simple haloscan comments systems on many blogs; it doesn't foster sophisticated discussion.

BTW, I am pretty sure that furnishing a "my comments" or similar link here will not be that difficult for techies.

I just think it's a prejudice that managment has that blinds them to what's needed by the users of the site. I saw it in the old set-up. They set up Scoop to link to "My Blog" when one clicked on a user name, when they should have chosen the link to go to the user page, so people could see all the content of a user--that's the standard or default. They made it difficult to find comments when actually it's easy to do so.

Since all the contributors, including Josh and Kate rarely comment, but rather, mostly start new posts, I suspect that they don't see how much of an attraction of accessing comments for most of the users here. They are on a different wavelength, they are thinking about framing issues. But most readers/users come to discuss the framed issues; that's what many appear to like about the site. People don't come here to blog, they come to discuss.

This is also why many people wanted threaded or stepped comments. So they could see a reply, click on it, click on "parent" and read only the sub-thread to get the context of the comment, and not have to read or scroll through the whole dang 150-long comment thread.

 There is little benefit to threaded comments if you can't easily access sub-threads. Perhaps some benefit in that you see a thread in outline form, but that is all.

Yes, "track" has me confused, too. (And the comments above give me a sense of how the default paragraphing question affects different posters, a question I'd raised this morning.)  

Also, am I mistaken or does a post with nothing below the fold, like one from Reed H. today, have a "continue reading" link? It wouldn't in the old design, and that's wiser. I felt silly clicking and waiting, in order to find nothing. 

I don't yet have the "feel" for how the home page works. Is it chronological reading down the left and then down the right, or is it chronological down the left with some features at right? I can't say yet whether it's unclear to average readers or I'm being a doofus, but I'll put it out.  

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

Ok, another dumb thought or two. I clicked on Coffee House (and I never did understand how it differed from the home page or even realize it did differ, so I'd love some clarification), and besides a different set of posts, I see a left column a bit like the right column in the old design, including disscussion posts as well as blogs. That might be helpful on the home page, but also I see that blog titles include author in parens, but discussion posts don't. Can I recommend adding author there, too?

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

With the "Rate All" button changed to "Rate", it means you have to reload the page multiple times to rate multiple comments.

"It's difficult to find the threads on which one was taking part in a discussion! New threads are going to push very recent threads down very fast. To participate in thoughtful discussion, one is going to have to put stories on favorites or something, and most people just won't do this. I think it's a serious flaw, it's going to hurt your goal of serious, thoughtful discussion, and is going to foster more short quippy like comments geared towards impressing or dissing the original post."

Yup. Exactly. It's very difficult for me to see how the new system isn't a fundamental downgrade from Scoop from a commenter's point of view.