Your frustrations are understandable, but even Josh's, Atrios's, and Kos's posts drop away after a day. It's the reality of a world with a fast news cycle.

I share many of your frustrations, Tom. I'd push for three reforms in particular:

1) I love your idea that exceptional reader posts might be promoted to the main TPM Cafe page. The Tuesday/Thursday wraps are a nod in that direction, but they come far enough apart that their content is generally stale, and they only provide links, not the posts themselves.

2) I agree that we've swung from too far in one direction to too far in the other. My solution would be to list the most popular posts by the number of recommendations made in the past 24 hours. That way, content that takes a while to get discovered still has a fighting chance, and content that continues to be relevant stays where readers can find it. I noticed this week that a post of mine on the obscure topic of Unpledged Add-On Delegates gradually gained steam. It had only a handful of recommendations in its first 24 hours, but more than fifty readers recommended it in the last day before it was dumped from the list. Conversely, a couple posts of mine that were very popular right when they were posted quickly became dated and stale, but hung around forever on the list because a great many people viewed them right when they went up. The present system would never have found a readership for the former post; the old system overvalued the latter posts. We need a nice middle ground.

3) I love the little check-boxes right at the bottom of the blogging page, that allow us to link our posts to TPM Election Central and TPM Muckraker. But why not add a half-dozen more? I'm imagining check-boxes labeled things like "Arts & Culture," "Middle East," "Economics," and "Environment." Then, add these topic headings to the TPM Cafe main page. Readers could click the topic headings to see all the posts recently contributed in that area. It would help bloggers respond directly to each other, not just in the comments section. It would also allow users interested in specific areas of the site to filter out other content, and to develop a more cohesive sense of community among their like-minded peers.

My $0.02

Until things get more sophisticated in this new set up, I am going to "recommend" things only because I want to personally keep track of something happening within; (and thus using artappraiser's tip of taking advantage of the only part of our accounts that tag links).

On the old site, I only recommended a post when I thought the post itself was particularly groovy.

Software is all about working around the boulders of an applications limitations....

Here's an observation: If it's true that the new design was for ads, we just lost some Internet turf to the Ann Coulter ads at the top of the page. ;-)

You're right about the search function as it stands now. Curiously, it worked fine a few days ago for searching on words in a recent post's title, but now seems to return only posts from the archives, and not current posts. I'm baffled at how we seemingly could be going backwards in terms of functionality, but then, I understand programming only minimally. And you're right, the search function, even when it was working better a few days ago, didn't allow a search on poster's names, so was of limited usefulness anyway.

Andrew: If you're reading this, please note that your bug post (in House Brew) has a bug itself. It shows, before opening, that there are 58 replies, but when opened reveals that there are 82 replies (last I checked). I'm concerned that you may have missed a whole bunch of issues, thinking that there were no further replies to your post.

Note that there are log in problems again and changing my password still does not work. I also notice (with some bemusement) that some of the suggestions the newer people have made in this thread are to add back the functions we had in the old TPM Cafe, such as the much beloved tracker.

Ben Hocking's ideas about an algorithm for recommended posts sound good.

I understand the need to revise the site so that it gets more hits and thereby more revenue (I want TPM to succeed after all, and realize that's the way to do it), but I wonder if there could be a way to retain the things that longtime users so appreciated about the old Cafe at the same time. Perhaps a "Back Room," where there could be more in-depth conversations? I'm not certain exactly how that might work and I certainly don't have any idea how that could be accomplished software-wise. It may be there's some other way of accomplishing essentially the same thing. But I don't see any reason, necessarily, why there needs to be an "either/or" approach, which seems to be what we have now, either by intent or by default. It may be that fixing the "recommended" posts issue ultimately might accomplish the same thing, by allowing good posts more exposure, and hence more opportunities for discussion.

Andrew: Could you please post a new update post regarding the progress on the bug fixes, and what we might expect in the next days or weeks?