Assurances are made by Josh and Andrew that improvements will come, although perhaps depending on funds. Here's his answer to one of my blog posts:

----"The prime reason behind the redesign of TPMCafe is twofold. First, it ran on a different software platform than the rest of our sites. That meant constant headaches for us in trying to keep it running and making it fit together with our other sites. Second, very few people could figure out how it worked. There some great things about it. And there was a core audience that had figured it out. But overwhelmingly our audience could not." [I guess the "core audience" was us---TW]

"I personally wanted the opinion pieces that run at TPMCafe to be more on the front page of TPM, in our news section. And I also wanted to find ways for the material that readers posted in their blogs to be more prominent, for them to get on the front page of TPM as well as on the front page of our other sites."

"We also thought it would expand the breadth of TPMCafe's discussions and community if cafe denizens could comment, using their same stable identities on TPM material from other sites too." [I've noted the use of the word "breadth" as opposed to depth---TW]

"As Andrew notes, there are still a couple levels of functionality such as threaded comments that aren't working correctly. And a few of the kinds of functionality that were lost -- such as ability to track threads, we're going to try to work back in as funds make it possible."

Some of us have measured a large traffic increase, so the important goal was met, I suppose. Drop by Eric Stepp's Cafe rump site:
http://projectlucidity.com/forum/index.php

I tried searching through blog posts at TPM by using Election Central as source. It appears that any blog post that went up there, or at Muckraker I guess, showed up at the Cafe. Interestingly, there is more than one Cafe. When you go to "all reader posts" at EC you get a page with the Cafe heading, but it's a different list of blog posts. That is, EC posts are there but not some original Cafe posts. In particular, one of mine, "Why Not a Subscription Cafe?" shows up in the Cafe rolls but not in the EC/Cafe rolls.

That may be because my identity is not working right, but the explanation for the instant increse is simply cross-linking into one site.

Another question I had was whether any notice was given to any sector at TPM that detailed what was coming. I searched at TPM, Election Central, and Muckraker, using "site upgrade" both with and without quotes. Nothing at Muck, EC returns an error message, but TPM returned this from the departed Kate Cambor, back when Josh did include us: http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2005/09/29/home_improvements/

Following up on Josh's recent post about some upgrades at the site, we want to get further imput from you about what you'd like to see done at TPMCafe. We narrowed down your suggestions to these four, but we'd like more suggestions from you over at the Cafe Management discussion table. Thanks for your help!