1- If the content is going to change frequently, you may want to a last updated timestamp, otherwise, people will just blaze on by....actually, perhaps it would work better to use that space for critical info for everyone (old and new), like coming updates, site policies, etc, and to link off to a separate section for more detailed "how-to" content

2- The information about "Muckraker" and "Election Central" isn't really complete. I still don't understand what the purpose of the "Muckraker" section is.

Typo: "videos of photos" in the penultimate paragraph.

Thanks for posting the link to the "reader posting page". I've looked for these guidelines before, but have never been able to find them. I see no link to them here in the Cafe, will you be providing a link here?

Also, can you highlight the "Recent Reader Posts" headline to do the same thing as the "All Reader Posts" link at the bottom of the list? It's a minor inconvenience to have to scroll down to the bottom of the list, but inconvenient nonetheless.

Great changes so far!

Nice set of instructions. I had no trouble understanding.

For some reason, I am unable to upload my profile photo. I get:

An error occurred
File manager wrote 0 bytes for that file.

You might warn them that they might only be able to access their last 10 blog posts, or if they are special, it might be 20, or who knows what those software guys are going to do, it's best to just save anything because publishing on TPMCafe is no guarantee that you will be able to find it or refer to it in a couple months, it's ephemeral and mercurial publishing....

that if they are trying to become a professional blogger/writer, that in a couple of months they may not be able to link to their posts here, soooo, maybe they should just consider this a place to cross-post, or perhaps post one's less thoughtful, more inflammatory stuff, or in order to attract traffic to your own site, because it's not going to be treated like it's anything but ephemera.

More seriously, I SEE A BIG PROBLEM with the way they are loading archives, and I'm putting it here because I don't know if you're looking at the other thread on it anymore.

Most people, like a certain user "agolis"
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/profile/agolis
don't have any more than 10 posts loaded on their user name yet. When you click on "View Talk Posts" on his user page, you get nothing, nada. The rest of his posts are probably here somewhere on this site, because he's not just a contributor but the boss, and most contributor posts were loaded from pre-software change, but currently they are HIDDEN somewhere on this site, loaded really for no sensible reason because no one can find them or see them.

When one goes to user Tom Wright's page, on the other hand,
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/profile/Tom%20Wright
and clicks on "View Talk Posts" to see some older ones, surprise surprise, you do get a couple of pages of them, certainly not all of them, not at all anywhere near what he contributed to this site and not including all the Discussion Table posts he took time and care to write well enough to get them voted published by peers. But you have something, a little bit, blog posts back to like the start of April. (Why is he so special? Who knows? :-))

BUT BUT BUT the way they are setting it up is not at all user-friendly and not at all standard, like ya know, most other websites. No, they have to be different and make it difficult. At the bottom of most websites like this, for the results of an archive of anything, at minimum, the site gives you little page numbers in groups and you can jump ahead or jump back.

Here, they decided to do it different, it starts promisingly with a link at the bottom called "More Entries »", but upon clicking, one is very disappointed to find that you have to go individual page by page through Tom's archive, and there is no damn way to jump ahead or jump back in the chronology.

Now I was under the impression that computers were supposed to automate things, silly me. Is there a new theory of web design called "retro manual" or something that I don't know about?

I discovered this lovely "feature" because I was looking to see if an old contributor had posted in Book Club. This contributor's last 10 posts went back to Oct. 2007. When I clicked on "View Talk Posts", like with agolis, there is nothing there. So I went to the Book Club page to scroll through, I thought I could somehow try to jump approximately to where it might be. Guess what? I find that there is no way to jump back (or forward) in time to a certain Book Club, that one must slog through, once again, page by page by page by page.

Could the trick be to wear searchers trying to find something out by having to scroll page by page until you give up sometime in 2007 and then the techies don't have to load 2006 until somebody finds a few hours of time to scroll and discovers they never loaded it? Yes, I am conspiracy minded, it's hard not to be as there seems to be no rhyme or reason to what they are doing.

It is really getting to the point where are I really want to know, who are these people setting this up? Have they ever used a site like ebay or DailyKos? Do they get how people use a website with a great deal of information on it? Do they know the meaning of an archive, that it's like a library, that the idea is that you are supposed to be able to find stuff, it's not just that you throw all the documents and books in umarked boxes?

What are we going to get? 10 posts, 20 posts, 20 posts each? How linked? Can they answer you?

What is incredibly ironic is that one place where they put a group of links to by date was something they called "Reader Blog Archives":
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/archives.php
But but but they didn't put any Reader Blogs there!!! They put Contributor's Blogs there!!!! It's a secret where those are! Will users ever be let in on that secret? What is the reason for mislabeling? Did they even look at this site before starting to work on it? Do they know there is a difference between a Reader and a Contributor or Columnist?

There is no way that I can see on the beta site to get at archives. There is no explanation and no communication from them about that.

All of this taken together, I don't find it too promising that TPMCafe or affiliates will be maintaining a decent record of what people write here, and that potential writers should consider that seriously as a factor in the amount of time they spend on what they write for this site. Contributors included. If you're a good or interesting writer, best to think of using this place as a temporary stomping ground to rustle up a fan club to eventually take along to your own site.

End of rant.

Andrew,
This is off toic, but I replied late last night with a long comment to a post by MJ from Sunday or Monday (about who’ll be Veep for Obama and Brazile-Bagala spat). I tried to login to it earlier today and was “not authorized.” Has it been deleted? I ask this first because MJ has altered or deleted whole posts in the past. If so, can we expect that to happen often? Isn't wiping out archived info a bit intellectually dishonest? Anyway, I can't access old comments yet, but I figure that's just taking time.
Thanks for the work you put in here.

Andrew and All,

I made some comments during the recent brief beta phase but will list some more here:

1) It would be good to have a persistent link to a page that lists various suggestions by readers and managements' comments on whether they're being thought about/are coming/are not possible in the near future/etc. It would help minimize periodic posts on the topic clogging up the Recent Reader Blogs queue.

2) Please give more details about the policy on including links in original posts and replies. It's clear that there's some sort of anti-comment-spam system in place. Writers should be told that. In addition, it would be good to know that if more than about X links are included, then the post will be shunted into the mysterious "Owner Approval" queue and will likely never see the light of day. :-/

3) Please indicate on the Instructions how to use the formatting buttons (e.g. something like, "Enter your text, highlight the text you want to apply a style to, then hit the relevant button.")

4) Please get rid of the Timeout of a login. Many, many replies get put in the wrong place in the discussion because people get logged out and the Checkbox (for replying to a particular comment) disappears. The software should be smart enough not to have to have the writer select a checkbox anyway... That might also get rid of the need to login multiple times to reply (which seems to happen again occasionally).

5) If TPM needs more money to improve the software, please say so. You have a very discrete "Contribute" link, but there's no indication that contributions are what's holding up improvements. We know that running something like this is expensive, and we know that software programming is not an exact science and is not cheap, but little information has been provided to indicate what it would take to make the software run the way the squeaky wheels among us would like. I understand that even if you had the money you need, we would still be frustrated by the pace of progress... Should we hold a fundraiser?

I don't have any old posts in the Archive that decided to roam around the country for a few months. But I agree with much of artappraiser's comments above. You really don't have too much time to get things closer to being right. Contributors will stop contributing if the software gets in the way of conversation and continues to be a black hole when it comes to searching for information.

With all of that said, I continue to appreciate your efforts and the high quality of much of the writing and investigative work done here. Thanks again. Good luck.