So now you're going to have to listen to us bitch about how much better this site was then the new one!!!

We bloggers will never be happy. :-) 

Glad you like it Don. Unfortunately, TPM is making an effort to bring everything together into a consistent look. Also, a lot of users find the current design very confusing. Regulars like yourself aren't necessarily a good general sample.

Why on earth did you change Election Central from TPMCafe's comment system to one that appears to be less flexible and less usable (not to mention less readable; I am glad you guys all have 80/20 close vision but someone my age doesn't)?

I assume you guys have a brand management strategy, but I am having an increasingly hard time understanding what it is: your changes seem to be going in the wrong direction.

sPh

Just as an example: your URL strategy seems counterproductive. Having the sites all based around tpm.com or something similar:

cafe.tpm.com
electioncentral.tpm.com
muckraker.tpm.com

would go along way toward unifying the separate components of the empire, make it clearer to people who owns it, and prepare for the future when you might want to unify everything in the style of a newspaper.

Instead you are proliferating URLS:

www.talkingpointsmemo.com
www.tpmcafe.com
www.tpmmuckraker.com
and now www.tpmelectioncentral.com

Hard to remember what is where and difficult to type as well.

sPh

I referred a friend to this site a few days ago. Her response was that she found it extremely confusing and hard to learn. (No, she isn't near senile like me either!) So, I support anything you do to make this conglomerate work better.

One suggestion: it should be easy to get to any of the sites from any other site, as it is from TPM now. At the top of each site should be links to all of the other sites. Currently Muckraker lacks this feature.

I will save my griping about the new look/design until I see it, but you can be sure I will be able to find something there to gripe about. That's part of the fun!

Hoppy in Sacramento

As one who is computer technology challenged
I will take this opportunity to not comment.

Yes, although that's a longer-term fix. Believe me, we share the exact same goal. Just takes time and money :)

meta meta....
:-)
I just clarified my own thinking along the lines you are talking about in the process of making this reply on the Election Central thread. I edited this in when it came to me:

It does not appear that Election Central will have any of these functions, it's just straight line commenting.....this is the way most blogs are set up, no? It's just for responding a quick comment or quip to the blogger or to add other thoughts, not for lengthy conversation. The blogger is the one conversing. Being as that the main posts on Election Central are mostly about day-to-day "breaking news" on the campaigns, it seems appropriate to me. I don't think I have seen a Greg Sargent post that says "let's discuss Hillary's candidacy" or "who are you voting for?"

Pre-primary brouhaha, your Election Central always seemed to me to be clearly branded for political horse race junkies, the types that want "breaking," like-minded sophisticated comments on the breaking, presuming a lot of knowledge on politics. When I wanted that, I went there. It was not for deep conversation!

What I think happened here recently is that people started taking Greg's daily news compilations as a chance to have long conversations about the candidates. But that's what THIS place is for, no? Long conversations? If you want to talk about how evil Hillary is, or not, start a "My Blog" post on it here, or whatever else if no contributor has offered you a chance to talk about what you want to talk about. For crying out, much of the stuff posted on Greg's threads was really way off-topic if you think on it.

So with that marketing theory laid out, I will be a very disappointed customer if you take away forum functionality here on the Cafe and go to simple line commenting. The forum software is what makes for the lengthy and deeper conversations.

More importantly, TPM Election Central had become it's own being, and didn't really make sense as a part of Cafe.

Yes, and everyone there was mean and gave me zeros a lot. 

Thanks so much, Andrew, for sharing the news with us.  Good to know you have been working on things, actually reading user feedback, and making decisions as you see fit accordingly.   We'll see how it goes. 

ArtA, how about a special blog section, titled Evil Politicians? Or just rants.  I don't think it's fair just to limit it to Clinton, as inviting a target as she is.  Or perhaps Evil People, and we could discuss each other as well. (But seriously, very very good point about the, let us say, expressive rather than cognitive value of too many Election Central discussions.) 

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

Yes, and everyone there was mean and gave me zeros a lot.

Are you masquerading as hadenough?? :)

I am delighted to hear that EC is working on bringing back the nested comments, because the new version really and truly is not terribly engaging right now.

the new version really and truly is not terribly engaging right now.

Off-topic, but I just had to say this comment made me laugh. Great example of an exaggerated understatement.

~~~~~~~~~~~
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

Come visit PROJECT: Lucidity
Where everybody knows your name...
unless you use a pseudonym

I can't wait for the redesign to start bitching -- hey, what happened to the Election Central RSS feed?

And speaking of RSS, can't we get the full posts in the feeds for the Coffee House feed? 

I don't follow.

It wouldn't need fixing if you hadn't gone and broken it. If you intend to apply the same 80s-retro tech to the whole Cafe you might as well just close up shop now. The only reason I can think of for trashing the EC comment section is that management thinks allowing easier driveby spam will somehow make the site look like a better ad buy. What a shame.

Having lived through several previous "upgrades" and their stumbles, I think you might want to post some screen shots or other previews of what is planned.

This way you might get some useful comments before everyone gets thrown into the deep end of the pool.

Personally I think that the current layout places too much emphasis on those on the front page and too little on the work of the non-ordained. I think it is nice that everyone can create a diary so this aspect should get some recognition. The voting system also seems to me not to be optimal. I think both of these factors discourage people from contributing material.

This site is one of the few where people can write about policy issues, most of the other popular ones have become fan clubs for political races. This will only get worse as the election cycle progresses. We need a place to discuss health, foreign and economic policies.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

I think you're really misreading me here. This is not about saying "screw the regulars, we want more!" The point is that by definition the people who are regulars in the comments will be most comfortable with the current design but that doesn't necessarily apply to other kinds of regulars. That would be like saying that because people are at a certain place it's not hard to find.

spHealey

I share your concerns about the teeny fonts, which are not convertible on IE. Additionally, you are unable to reply to a poster nor edit a comment.  Overall, all strong reasons not to participate in what has become the prototype for spamming. The level of discourse on EC is now clearly in the cellar. EC is attempting to appeal to all the morons that dominant numerous sites...I suspect it is all about ad revenues and 'unique hits'.

At least they have not destroyed TPMcafe at this point. I hope it is left alone.

Curmudgeons...

a lot of users find the current design very confusing. Regulars like yourself aren't necessarily a good general sample.

Management's lack of response to requests for an introduction and instructions
to new users is the reason for this disconnect!

As asked before:

Is what the community is asking to have here any different from the discussion to recognize and improve “The Commons” or “The Public Interest” in our physical communities or general society??

Are you bulldozing our community over
with little regard to those who helped you?

-----------------------------------------------
Today, are we searching for I deals or Ideals?
-Thinking

Not that's not correct. The Coffee House does not include everything on the front page! Coffee House ONLY includes those posts put in the "Coffee House" category.

Sorry, I did not go into detail on that cause I thought it would just confuse; it IS confusing, and it's not that important because one has google to find things.

There is no record kept of what the entire front page is for us users except for the single page at the time. Never was. It may be possible to do that, it might not be. The point: if you miss it, it's gone, the individual posts are stored in the categories only. You cannot access yesterday's front page.

The front page is like a conglomeration of all the categories on the tabs. The categories hold the archives and yes, they have the pages going all the way back.

I think, but am not sure that Book Club posts and Table for One posts and the like have their own categories, usually not put in Coffee House.

I sort of know how it works from using other forum software and how it has gotten messy. Those empowered to post like tick off where they want the post to go, some may only be empowered to post in a certain area, some to put it also on Front Page. An empowered editor can go and elevate a post by a contributor to the front page, this is how the My Blog posts get front paged and it is why you see other posts move around sometimes.

In the past, there also have been articles in the Contributor's sections that have not been on the front page! I only discovered this after being here for quite some time. There were quite a few stories when they had the New Orleans category by people in New Orleans that weren't on the front page, I discovered them on the global tracker which few know about. So very few people saw those stories, only people going directly to the New Orleans section.

Here's an example of the archival problem with that: someone like Josh is empowered to post everywhere, and consequently, you find he put some of his things on Cafe meta issues in Coffee House and then Front Page'd them, while others have been put instead in Cafe Management discussion table and Front Page'd those. You're looking for it, you knew you saw it on the Front Page but you can't find it, because you're looking in the wrong category, and there's no front page archive to look to.

Or I tried once to find a Book Club discussion that expired. I had to go to google, it wasn't where the running Book Club was. Who knows where they go. There's no tab there now for Book Club, for instance. Where would you look for the last Book Club if you wanted to? Or if they take away the America Abroad tab, you will not be able to see those posts in chronology.

As I said, not a big deal as to the archival problems, just confusing, as one can use google.

But there is no way for people who miss a day or two to see what was on the front page. They can only try to find what they missed by visiting all the sections.

Right you are, it is only the posts that were originally posted to the Coffee House and not posts that were front paged from elsewhere. I didn't catch that.

Andrew - is there any way to easily find the archived Book and/or Table for One discussions?

The worst thing you can do to a dogma is give it an empire. Anon

Sorry for the over reaction.
I look forward to seeing the update.
Could we have introduction and instructions for new users?

Again, sorry for any stress inflicted on you by my keys, foot, and “all in” mouth disease.

-----------------------------------------------
Today, are we searching for I deals or Ideals?
-Thinking

I think we should:

Andrew, the new site sucks. Didn't you people test this crap???

"I think we should have a comprehensive report in September on whether the redesign is working or not."

"The userbase must vote on accepting the redesign now, and authorize TPM management to implement those designs."

"Remember, Andrew posts at the pleasure of the management."

"As the design stands up, the management will stand down."

"TPMCafe must be redesigned, it is proliferating Postings of Mass Deletion."

...

Here we go, we should have a TPMCafe redesign slogan.

"Redesign Accomplished!" 

~~~~~~~~~~~

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

Come visit PROJECT: Lucidity
Where everybody knows your name...
unless you use a pseudonym

Let the surge begin!

Ok, is it coincidence... or conspiracy theory?

Attorney General

Alberto Gonzales

Andrew Golis

~~~~~~~~~~~

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

Come visit PROJECT: Lucidity
Where everybody knows your name...
unless you use a pseudonym

Speaking of finding things easily...will the search function be improved in the new design? Right now it's just about useless and it would be nice to be able to search here, rather than with google. 

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." ~~ Abraham Maslow

Unfortunately no.

Again, this is only an aesthetic redesign, and for now the functionality of TPMCafe will remain the same.

and hilariously coincidental

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