This is the next edition of “Site Comments”, a parallel to the “Random Comments” threads, and meant to relieve the density of commenting in those. While the Random Comments threads will continue to welcome comics-related (and semi-comics-related) topics, as well as life-in-general, this Site Comments thread is the place for suggestions / complaints / questions / musings on how this site is organized and operates. So if you have thoughts about, say, the placement of Recent Comments versus Recent Posts lists, this would be the place for that.
(That is not to say this is the only form of feedback available. Among other routes, you can write to Editors at the submissions address, submissions dot cidu at gmail dot com. But it is explicitly intended to funnel off site commentary from the Random Comments threads.)
This will also be a place for site managers to post questions and requests for ideas, along with operational notices like warnings of theme experimentation coming up etc., besides alerts in separate sticky posts.
At the same time as inaugurating this kind of thread, it is time for yet another rollover of the venerable Random Comments thread. The one about to close, with 369 comments, is “Random Comments, Late 2020 Edition” , and the one getting started contemporaneous with this Site Comments is “Random Comments, February 2022 Edition”.
Also: A list of the site’s most recent comments can be found in the left sidebar (under “folder” icon 2nd tab). A database of all the comments, compiled by larK, is here, and can also be found linked in the left sidebar menu.
And the site’s former FAQ is here, representing the unique voice and outlook of CIDU Bill. An update for current addresses and notes is now available here, and can also be found linked in the left sidebar menu.
Comics I Don't Understand 
New Site Comments and Random Comments threads have been started. If you’re interested, please review both at your convenience.
There are a number of links associated with these changes requiring updates. (Each one points to its predecessor , they each point to each other, and menu items point to the new editions.) Please check these out too. Remaining to update is the Index listed in the menu .
If you find errors or have suggestions, please either post a comment here, or email to the usual contact address, submissions dot cidu at gmail dot com. Thanks!
How do you like a comment? Sometimes one of my comments is liked, but I don’t see that option on other people’s comments.
OK. Mitch4 liked my comment just to mess with me! 😀
I do Likes from the Word Press Reader mode. It shows an outline star near any post or comment, fills it in if I click to like the item, and also shows a count of likes and sometimes usernames.
And I can do Likes from one version of the admin page for Comments. It just shows a star either outline or filled, depending on whether I have done a like. But not numbers or usernames.
There is a setting which will put likes onto the regular web page interface! For everybody to see and deal with, just as on some social medias. [Ignore my neo-plural there.] We tried it briefly once for CIDU. Announced I think as a one-day experiment, it was shouted down and removed after about an hour. It doesn’t go well with the ethos.
Now that the kerfuffle about the old CIDU URL has settled down, I think it’s time for a loud round of virtual applause for getting not only Bill’s old “venting spleen” URL restarted very quickly, but most of all for redirecting the site to a wonderful, new, very short URL: cidu.info – well done, Mitch, and thank you! (And if there were others involved, thanks to them, too!)
Thanks for your support, @Kilby.
Just a reminder, everyone, we always need YOUR selections to refill the queue.
Just email to CIDU DOT SUBMISSIONS AT GMAIL DOT COM.
Actual puzzling CIDU comics especially needed! Always in shortage!
OY and LOL always welcome, for the weekend collections. As Bill established this practice, anything that strikes you as a groaner (or good word-play), or a good laugh, can be sent in and almost automatically published with almost no editorial scrutiny.
Eewwww need to be something else as well – funny enough to be Eewww-LOL, or puzzling enough to be Ewwww-CIDU. But please, not just “how emetic can they get?”.
Synchronicities can be fuzzy about timing, but the similarity of content or theme should be striking, and not predictable by calendar. OR the comics could be good LOLs or OYs or CIDU on their own, worth seeing as such and with the timing coincidence as an added fillip.
Arlo Award candidates will still be tagged or discussed as such. Full Arlo Page material won’t work, we aren’t managing the separate Arlo Page any longer.
While we never want to encourage simple bashing of unsuccessful comics, we have been trying occasional collections of comics that seem close to working well, but fall down in some particular and are disappointing. A tag you can use when sending these in could be “Oopsies” or “Almosts”.
But again, most needed: actual puzzling CIDUs, as daily bread!
Thanks everyone, for reading and commenting, and also of course for helping supply material for all to enjoy!
Oops, I thought “marcia” (in the new site subheader) was only supposed to be “Brady”; I didn’t realize that it was also Italian until I put “alla” into an online translator.
(Details omitted intentionally…)
Okay, if anyone else from here is in on that auction, we should make sure we’re not pointlessly bidding each other up.
@Mitch4 – My guess is that you are bidding on an “Encyclopedia”, but without at least a few of the omitted details, nobody here will be able to be sure.
The point of my comment about auction was just to avoid counter productive conflict of bids. Anyone not involved in an auction at the moment should just ignore it.
Further info for those who think it might apply to them, the bidding will close on 3/7 or maybe 3/8 I forget.
Speaking of URLs, I watched some of the Jeopardy college championships. The contestants did not come up with what URL stands for. I started to say “Universal” before correcting to “Uniform”.
“Okay, if anyone else from here is in on that auction, we should make sure we’re not pointlessly bidding each other up.”
Well, I dropped out. Still watching the auction – they keep extending for 5 minutes at a go if they get another bid. It’s getting to silly amounts.
This is for the domain name that expired.
We don’t need it for our operation. But it would be unfortunate if the purchaser used it for something that would leave people confused.
“Bidder 10” took it, for $3,010.
For that amount of money, I sincerely doubt that the purchaser has altruistic intentions. Perhaps it is time to place some pre-emptive documention about CIDU on Wikipedia, including accurate information about the correct URLs. Do we have any experienced Wiki-Editors here?
Here’s an odd detail that puzzles me: why did the “Seriously” post get tagged as type “image”? Most other posts (such as “Smells like…Spirit“) don’t have any type at all. Is this just another example of WordpresS being inconsistent?
More like WP being consistent with its own idea of what’s what. I could have changed it if I had noticed. But I think the reason it picked that in the first place is that the post didn’t contain any text, or nothing besides an image.
Kilby says:
Most other posts (such as “Smells like…Spirit“) don’t have any type at allIt’s called “Standard” internally and just is not displayed. The WP term for this ‘type’ btw is “Post Format” and it seems to be restricted to a list of six, selected thru a drop-down selector in the edit page. The choices are Aside, Image, Link, Quote, Standard, and Video. I haven’t learned about the effects, if any, of choosing a different one.
The answer to the mystery has been revealed. The old CIDU URL was purchased for a Cambodian betting website, in a ridiculous attempt to slightly increase their traffic. On the other hand, if they have that kind of cash to waste, they must make sizable profits.
Kilby said: “The old CIDU URL was purchased for a Cambodian betting website, in a ridiculous attempt to slightly increase their traffic. ” Yes, that was weird!
But now it points to what looks like a Word Press “getting started” site, with the name “Comics I Don’t Understand” (!!) and a system-provided sample landing page and first linked page. Those are the screenshots below.
Well now (2022-03-23) it has gone back to the gambling site.
Having just mentioned the original “Arlo Page” in the Shakesperian “Wrong Hands” post… Even if our editors do not have access to manage that site, it might be worth informing the Bickels that the back-link that is supposed to return from there to the CIDU website now lands at a fairly obnoxious betting page.
Woops! We sailed past a sort of numerical landmark while I wasn’t looking. That was 70K published comments. This one will be 70,003 probably.
The comicsidontunderstand.com URL was returned to a “parked WP site” for a while, but now is again an Indonesian gambling site, altho a different one.
@Kilby and @Michael Cook, that’s what I thought too, but didn’t want to be impolite about mentioning other routes for contributing. In a way, “topic drift” has traditionally been able to handle the introduction of a different comic than the post was originally covering. However, that has usually been more of a tangent and less of a non sequitur.
Perhaps we could clarify a route for readers to post for discussion their CIDUs, other than by mailing in suggestions and waiting; and not forcing a sharp turn in an existing thread about some other comic. I wonder if our RANDOM COMMENTS thread is the right place for that? Or perhaps institute a third continuing thread?
Just to cover all the bases (see also EDM), I think Random Comments is the correct location for anyone who cannot (or does not want to) use e-mail for a CIDU submission. As this issue aptly demonstrates, it isn’t a good idea to conduct one discussion in three different locations, so if a CIDU submission does come in to Random Comments, I think it should be moved (and not just copied) to a new post.
Please note that the CIDU editorial team has added two new co-editors, whose monikers you will be seeing on upcoming posts (and also anonymously working on the list-like OY and LOL posts); and in e-correspondence with you when you send in comics to the submission address. Please make PHSIIICIDU and ZBICYCLIST welcome — both of whom you probably already know from commenting!
CALL FOR HOLIDAY COMICS
We’re going to succumb to Independence Day fervor and have a potpourri posting on the Fourth, with any and every kind of comic, whether funny, punny, or puzzling, as long as it relates to that holiday.
But it’s scheduled to go live on the day! So we need items that are already out there! Thanks!
Testing comment timestamp after adjusting site timezone
[sorry, the Holodeck CIDU post was not meant to be posted yet. My apologies to those who commented. Maybe it will preserve your comments into the actual publication next Monday.]
@ Mitch – To which time zone did you move the CIDU server? Will this result in posts appearing even earlier, or later?
P.S. Personally, I would be in favor of using 6am Pacific time as the standard post appearance slot.
I have no idea whether this can be set up as the default in WordPress, but it would mean that most US readers would be able to take a fair shot at commenting in the morning, whereas we Europeans would have to wait until 3pm (these times are equivalent, of course, but the current setup gives Europe an unfair advantage, because most of America is asleep when the posts appear).
“P.S. Personally, I would be in favor of using 6am Pacific time as the standard post appearance slot.”
Then it would make you no difference if it were 8 AM Central?
Or 9 AM Eastern?
It of course does not matter how you set the time, but now that you mention it, 9am Pacific (noon Eastern, 6pm Europe) would probably be the best (or “fairest”) solution (daylight hours for the whole western hemisphere). The only question is whether it would be simple to set that time as an easy-to-use default, and avoid a manual setting for every post. Although it is obviously possible to set the exact hour† for each post’s appearance, I have been assuming that the “standard” appearance slot would be midnight for the server’s selected time zone. Nine am Pacific time would mean midnight in Cambodia: a very odd, but perhaps appropriate coincidence, in view of what happened to this site’s original URL.
P.S. CIDU Bill (†) used to create a separate post for each hour of his 24-hour (birthday) projects, but he implied that it was at least slightly difficult to get it all set up correctly.
BTW, when Kevin A mentions “For those … who … wonder about editorm’s quote from the final chapter” it happens that he is correct and I did write the editorial note for the last comic, the Shoe, as reflected in the posting stamp “JULY 17, 2022 by EDITORM“.
But please note that WordPress only uses single posting account attributions, and may be misleading when more than one of the co-editors has had a hand in any particular post (blog entry). This is especially likely with the multi-comic posts presenting lists, like the Saturday OYs or Sunday LOLs. In fact yesterday’s OYs post, though stamped “JULY 16, 2022 by EDITORM” , included a couple of comics inserted and remarked by other editors.
re: My friend’s ginger cat is named Orange Julius
Obligatory Simpsons:
The password thing doesn’t work for me – I enter my WordPress password (the same one that lets me log in to post this), the whole page flickers and I’m back at the top with “enter your password” showing. The exact same thing happens if I click Enter without putting anything in the password box. And I can’t get in to post a comment on that item… I don’t know if anyone else can, it doesn’t say any comments have been posted but I’m not sure if that would be hidden. I do see the CIDU tag.
Thanks for the data.
The mechanism is not user/password pair but just item/password like lock/key, with a single password for everyone to use.
The experiment was in service of figuring out some solutions to how to let a non-wp member do a “guest post” in collaboration with an editor, and see the successive drafts. The password mechanism wasn’t the best solution!
(And I’ve unpublished the experiment password item, if you’re reading these comments and wondering what we’re talking about)
The text said “… enter your password here …”, but I wasn’t about to entrust any password of mine to a random input field (I was sure that it was just an experiment, since there was no matching field for User-ID). Therefore, I tried entering your password – in the hope that whoever set it up had a sense of humor. Alas, that didn’t work, either.
How dare you use my password!
Kilby, your joke does not take into account that in fact the lock-and-key password had previously been mailed to you!:-)
I was working from my phone, sitting in a hospital waiting room, and had no access to that e-mail until this morning.
Carl Fink says “Have you considered adding “Submit a Comic You Don’t Understand” as a link on the left side of the page?”
Thanks for bringing up the idea, Carl. I was going to reply that our Plan doesn’t support Forms. When what should I discover by experimental clicking but a page of Form Responses, all labelled “[Comics I Don’t Understand] Contact”. When I say all of them , that’s all five. Dates ranging from January 21, 2018 (CIDU Bill saying “Does this work?”) to August 10, 2020 (somebody wanting to sell us digital promotion services). But the three in between were actually CIDU suggestions!
So in principle, yes it could work! Meanwhile, if anybody spots and can describe where on the site a Contact button or form can be seen, please send in a description of where to find it!
(Followups to where this is duplicate posted as a comment in Site Comments, please.)
For the moment I’m dealing with the unearthed Contact Form CIDU suggestions. All 3 submitters have been seen as commenters at least a few times, though only one within this year. (The Contact Form results were all 2018.) Hmm, should we check with them before using these?
The Contact Form can be reached at https://cidu.info/contact/
We’ll spruce it up! And link in the main menu.
Thanks for instigating this, Carl.
Does the Contact for send email to the usual address or is putting the messages someplace?
The current contact form is putting its results somewhere on the site. The new one I’ve started working on is using email; I’m looking for the setting to have it saved like the Contact form.
The current contact form BTW was made before the Block Editor and is in Classic editor access — I haven’t opened it that way but expect some solid HTML. For the new one I’m trying the block editor but for now leaving it very clunky.
After seeing that sometimes the email doesn’t provide the most reliable way of getting stuff to us, I was thinking that having it show up saved on site has some advantages. Brian, what was on your mind in asking this? Do you see some advantage for either method.
Okay, for testing purposes it is at https://cidu.info/test-of-suggest-a-cidu-from-blank-page/
It is sending email, to usual address
If you want to try it out, please also send separate regular email saying you submitted a test , and mentioning the name or alias you used so that we can tell if it worked.
Thanks!
Does the Contact for send email to the usual address or is putting the messages someplace?The existing contact form saves messages on the site. My earlier account of the five messages saved was from looking at them there.
That was quick! I thought of it because I tried to submit, and submissions@cidu.info is apparently invalid, but in my email address book. (Sent again this morning.)
I just resent a strip with the contact form that I had e-mailed earlier today with the wrong link. I don’t see a way to include an image file on the contact form. Did I miss it?
That was quick! I thought of it because I tried to submit, and submissions@cidu.info is apparently invalid, but in my email address book. (Sent again this morning.)Well no, that is not the right address. (It was at one time, briefly, but quite a while ago and not for long.) If you’re seeing it somewhere – besides your private address book – let us know so we can erase and replace it with the correct one.
The correct one is
CIDU.submissions@gmail.com
which also appears prominently on the site, usually as a graphic. Case does not matter. There are no hyphens, just dots and an at.
I just resent a strip with the contact form that I had e-mailed earlier today with the wrong link. I don’t see a way to include an image file on the contact form. Did I miss it?No, there is no provision for image upload; neither on the original CONTACT form page, nor the new (under testing) SUGGEST A CIDU form page. On the new SUGGEST A CIDU form there is a remark about using Postimage to upload an image and share a URL for it.
Which one were you using for your test. Did you see the bit earlier about one going into a results page in the site and the other using email. So it’s hard to answer whether we received it.
Kilby, if you mean the one that starts off
This is a duplicate of a strip I submitted earlier today, but it corrects the link... Today's Macanudo confirmed Linier's fascination with penguins: >It was entered using the original CONTACT form page, and did make it into the form responses list on the site. It did not go into email, as that is not how the original CONTACT form is set up.
To all following the tech side of this — Correction, I said the new SUGGEST A CIDU form page in testing sent mail instead of saving responses in site. That was incorrect; it does both.
Okay, could we please get just one or two tests from non-editors of the form at
https://cidu.info/suggest-a-cidu
If you would, please also comment here in Site Comments that you have used the form – so we know to check for it. As currently set up, it is saving on site as well as sending by email. It has been working for me, but we should check that wasn’t just because I was logged in as an editor.
Thanks, we’ve learned a few things from your tests!
-It tells us “Sent by an unverified visitor to your site” or else “Sent by a verified WordPress.com user”
I’ve fixed the page title but apparently the form itself has a name so the emails are saying something about “Suggest a CIDU (From blank page)”
Okay, these two forms pages have been added to the “main menu” (first menu tab on left, triple-line icon). Also in the second menu (file folder icon tab) the text widget “ADDRESS FOR CONTRIBUTIONS” (with the image of the submissions address) now also has added “Also, you can use the new Suggest A CIDU form page.” with the latter part a link.
Following onto the trifecta of posts originating from a “Recovered suggestion box item“, I have a couple suggestions:
1) Instead of placing that long text designation at the beginning of the post’s title, it would be better if it were placed (only!) in the post’s “tags”. If it has to go in the title, then add it to the end, not the beginning.† The problem is that the list of “recent comments” truncates the titles, and it is therefore impossible to see which post has been commented upon by each person.
2) How many items were hidden in that cache? Were there any others that might be postable? (Of the three that did get posted, two were repeats.)
P.S. † – This also applies (in lesser measure) to the “Sunday Funnies”. I’ve often felt that it might be better to start those post titles with the date, to make the shortened titles distinguishable.
Those three were the only ones containing comics suggestions.
Have there been any recent changes that might have had an effect on the default size of the comment entry frame? It used to be a lot larger, but currently it shows up with space for only one or at most two lines of text. On my desktop browser, there is a gripper icon in the lower left corner that can be used to stretch it larger, but this feature does not appear under Safari on my mobile devices. This has become fatal on my iPad, because now the frame is so small that it only shows one half of a line of text, making text entry extremely difficult, and editing impossible.
Entering more lines than the text frame will hold produces a vertical scroll beam on my desktop, but not on the iPad’s Safari.
Has anyone else noticed anything like this?
It’s been like this for me for quite a while. Fortunately the resizer still works, but the box is never quite rightly sized, so that there is always the slightest horizontal scroll, and you can’t ever see the full width text (about 1 1/2 characters on either end get cut off). The default size of the box is also half a character high. I think this has gotten worse over time, but I haven’t really been keeping track: since I have had to start to resize the comment box, it’s all the same, so I haven’t particularly noted how badly mis-sized the initial box is.
The cause is because this template, or maybe the underlying functionality of WordPress (ie: all templates) rewrite the simple form functions that have been in html since the very start with stupid javascript: the three field for Email, Name, and Website do not appear until you click on the textbox for the comment — it has always been thus, but at some point the sizing got screwed up. Personally, I would drop this stupid functionality for stability — just use plain old vanilla input fields and a textarea, but what do I know?
I have also noticed irregular, ongoing changes in the font, which change the sizing, especially for the comments form.
I have experimented with some color specs, but not anything to do with typefaces or sizes.
I’m atm in Firefox on my Android phone in vertical mode. Things are a little cramped but my only problem is sometimes hitting a wrong key that sends me sailing off to lands unknown. The fields fit comfortably on screen, and if I need to expand the main text input area, to some extent it dies it automatically and correctly, but I can also use that mentioned resize gripper which for me is at the bottom right corner.
Thanks, Dana, I meant lower right, not lower left.
P.S. Another new effect is that the button for “Post Comment” no longer has anything around it to show that it is a button.
Just to see whether the data entry form is device or browser dependent, I attempted to comment (in the serial comma thread) from my iPhone, using Firefox instead of Safari. Since I’ve never tried that before, I expected wordpress to demand a new login. However, the advantage is that the form that includes Used-ID and e-mail also provides a larger frame for the comment. Apparently it is only the “logged in” entry form that suffers from the size problem. Unfortunately, WordPress decided to “vanish” the result.
Here’s a suggestion for a sort of structured-commenting game, from Bill$dollar (aka dollarbill):
I know, let's have a pun-fest. Nothing is out of bounds. Or just say, let's ignore the strips comments online and limit our comments to one at a time until we've had a go-round-ish, then time for the second pun from those still in the game. We could accept just plain comments without some wordplay also, by mentioning that as one of the rules for this particular comic.Any thoughts on how this could work? Responses here or also at Random Comments.
To be perfectly honest, I really do not understand at all what the object of the structure is supposed to be, nor how it is supposed to work. Is this supposed to be for a particular comic, or in general? Which strip comments are we supposed to ignore?
I would definitely not be in favor of instituting a new set of rules or for “turn taking” on normal CIDU posts, but the editors could always set up a special post for a designated “Pun Fest”. Since there is no way to enforce alternation with the open comment form at the end of a normal post, everyone would need to agree to make only one comment each, until the designated “Moderator” comments that the current round is ended, and a new round can then begin. The Pun-Fest “moderator” would be responsible for reporting duplicate comment infractions to the Editors, and getting them to delete the offending comment(s).
Another method would to make the comments on the post “closed”, and the Admins could set up a separate “Submit a Pun-Fest-Comment” form. However, then somebody would have to moderate and attach each comment to the post. It seems like this is going to result in an awful lot of administrative effort, and I still don’t really see what it is supposed to achieve.
P.S. Here’s a completely different suggestion for a modest improvement to the CIDU website: with all due respect to Our (hallowed) Founder, I think it’s time to weed out and/or replace the comics listed in the “Blog Roll” (near the bottom of the “folder” menu in the upper left corner). I would have no objection to retiring the entire list, but at the very least, the links to Jimmy Johnson’s blog and to Bug Martini should be eliminated: both have become unproductive orphans. Another outdated feature that
couldshould be removed is the “Category Cloud”: many (if not most) of the items listed there are no longer relevant.I wasn’t aware there was a cloud. I never scroll down in that frame because I get my links from LarK. The only time I access the folder is to use the search.
I don’t know if I would fall for “it”, there’s a better chance that I might have fallen for “her”.
P.S. We may not have a whole yearful of October, but Friday the Thirteenth falls on a Thursday this month.
P.P.S. Still on the subject of the CIDU site’s “subheader”, this “Non-Sequitur“showed up yesterday:
Obviously, Flo’s answer is “no”. There were a couple of odd things about the strip as was discussed in comments. What happened to the woman’s car? Where do people even park? Note the difference in the entry from Panel 1 to Panel 5, understanding that the first one is the throwaway.
Both vehicles are moving when we see them (hence the puff behind) so there could be a parking lot off-camera on the left.
The change in the pier from the first to the last panel, though, I don’t see any way to account for other than the artist messing up (probably in the form of grabbing a preexisting throwaway panel in a rush)… usually Wiley doesn’t make such mistakes though.
(Off topic / individual note)
@Dave in Boston — I hope you are receiving our emails, about the Zits cartoon, following up on your “Suggest-a-comic Form” submission. We have been getting bounce/undeliverable messages from one or another email service along the way.
Oh crud, I just used the usual posting address without thinking. It is, at this point, almost certainly not going to work. Sorry about the noise…
@Dave, thanks for clarifying about the email. The upshot re the Zits cartoon is that we do want to use it, but not immediately, and maybe in an anchor post for another doesn’t-fit-CIDU kind of category.
Do whatever you like – you’re the editor 🙂
This may not be immediately apparent to some contributors, but the reason why the CIDU editors are (exceedingly) polite about acknowledging every new CIDU submission is that the reply mail also serves as a notice to the other three editors. The idea is to prevent any one comic from getting posted multiple times. This wasn’t necessary back when Bill was running the site as a one-man show, although Bill often did reply to submissions, especially when there was an “obvious” explanation as to why a particular strip did not qualify as a CIDU.
Does the search feature only look at the titles of posts, and not the comments? I was trying to find the one where we ended up discussing the metric system but couldn’t find it. Changing the search to “liter” found a bunch of posts with “literally” in the title.
@ Brian in StL – It searches just the post titles and any text included at the top of the post, but not the readers’ comments. To search through those, use “Search For This Textsite:cidu.info“.
P.S. With a space between “…Text” and “site…”, of course.
P.P.S. The metric discussion is in Mary’s Card Conundrum.
Kilby said: “@ Zbicyclist – [Only] after seeing that comment for the third time did I notice the virtually invisible rectangular icon in the second line. The dropbox link was cumbersome, but it did (eventually) work.”
I couldn’t make sense of this at first, as I never saw that icon nor any Dropbox link, as Zbicyclist’s linked-in picture was all along displaying fine for me, in the regular WP browser format. Then I clicked on the image and saw Dropbox and a share message. (Though I had no reason to do that originally, as the image was there in the comment.)
I’ll embed it via Postimage here, for those who did not previously see it. This and Kilby’s selection from the same artist are indeed interesting!
@Brian in STL and @Kilby,
(I think my previous comment, with the Anatol Kovarsky drawing, actually belonged better in a different thread. But I’ll leave it here too, for some relevance to searching in comments.)
Brian said (here): Does the search feature only look at the titles of posts, and not the comments? I was trying to find the one where we ended up discussing the metric system but couldn’t find it. Changing the search to “liter” found a bunch of posts with “literally” in the title.
Kilby, thanks for the general search engine (or is that specifically Google?) formulation for site-specific search. I’m afraid I still don’t get it exactly, even after your correction.
But I wanted to point out a different site-internal resource . Watch for some email.
The “site:cidu.info” works both with Google and DuckDuckGo. It limits the results to pages found at the specified URL.
Erm, thanks but that part I already did understand.
My misunderstanding was a good deal stupider. When you wrote
somehow I took “Search For This Text” as another part of the command, to be written literally. And left me wondering where to enter the text to search for! Yikes!
I’m familiar with that site search method, but I still had trouble finding that message. In the usual way, that was in this week’s Meryl flood.
Congratulatoons to Voodoo Chicken for posting Comment Number 75,000! (In thread Dark Side Platter)
The Veterans Day thread has been reposted, but I did not receive an email announcing that fact. Maybe that is why it has no new comments so far.
Usual John, I don’t know the underlying mechanism or conditions that govern the email notifications. Evidently there is a different handling for reposts.
@ Usual John – That Nov. 11th post is not “new”, it’s just been given a new date (that’s why it still has CIDU Bill’s name). Under these circumstances, I wouldn’t expect notification for a new post. As for comments, it’s still rather early (9:15 am East Coast time): give everyone time to wake up and figure out whether they have something sensible to say.
One of our two iPads seems to have spontaneously forgotten that it was logged into wordpress, so it now requires a user ID and password for new comments. Contrary to my earlier expectations, this had absolutely no effect on the size of the comment entry frame, it is still about 2/3rd of the height of one line. Is there anything that the admins can do to the so-called
template“theme” to enforce a minimum height for that field? I don’t know why it shrank, but it’s been this way for several months now, and it makes entering comments very difficult.Michael, I’m sorry these parts of the WP system are giving you trouble. I believe I’ve already posted screenshots of all the admin settings that have bearing on commenting, and that we’ve tried adjusting several of them.
All I can suggest are some workarounds.
A. You could try out the Reader mode of WP. This is not the Reader mode built into some browsers, but a separate facility provided by WP. Go to wordpress.com/read and sign in. When you find a post you want to read and maybe comment on, the post and thread of comments are presented with CSS and stylings inherent to WP Reader and not making use of the Themes and appearance of the particular WP blogs these posts are coming from.
The up side of that is that there is uniform and readable placement of items on the page; and that you see when a comment is a reply to another comment, with a note to that effect plus indentation; and that there are “like” stars to click and visible scores based from them.
The down sides are in some cases just the flip of the ups. Scoring “likes” is unpopular with many people. Imposing a uniform appearance robs the blogs of some of their character and individuality, and also removes the useful widgets they may have deployed on their custom sites. And it is hard to find specific older posts from blogs you follow — the Reader shows you recent posts or updates from all the WP blogs you follow. Several CIDU readers tried the Reader mode, for the indent and stars features, but left it because of the feed structure.
That went on a while so I will leave other suggestions for separate comments.
B. This is specific to Kilby, or to others who have been added as users on the admin side of the CIDU site. Instead of following comments from the main posts on the standard web browser view of the site, try accessing just the comments from either
https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit-comments.php?comment_status=all
or
https://wordpress.com/comments/all/cidu.info
Both of these present the comments (with different appearances) from all currently active threads, in one list by reverse chronological order. One shows included graphics, the other shows the link URLs. They name the post for which the comment is in a thread, and also say what comment it is in reply to (but does not show the full text, nor use placement and indenting to show reply sequences). There is a Reply button on each listed comment, which will open up a generous-sized form textbox, with resize capabilities. Also some basic text format edit buttons (like italic or bold) so you don’t need to use Markdown nor HTML markup — one of them cutely uses the buttons to insert HTML tags into the text, the other is more WYSIWYG.
The transparency of where you are and what you’re doing is among the up sides of using these views. Also that you are shown new comments from any thread that is still accepting comments, not just those you’ve written in and have asked for notifications. And also thus you don’t need to go clicking around to those different threads.
The down sides include getting yourself confused about what thread some comment belongs in! Also — a big one — that you don’t see the actual post the comments are flowing from, and only the most recent comments. So in practice you need to keep another tab open with a normal browser view of the CIDU site. Another down side is that you need to get permission for these panels. Kilby, you might try them out and report back whether the “contributor” level status is sufficient.
C. Kilby, you keep referring to settings like width or adjustability of comment FORMS as coming from THEME settings. I’m not at all sure that could be right. They seem more likely to come from the core WP engine.
In any case, they aren’t in the settings interface that we have access to. If this were not hosted at WordPress.com but just used the free code distribution from wordpress.org under our own installation, then we would have access to the files for both the WP core and for downloaded/installed themes. (But with the big challenge of maintaining them, and customizing.) But we are on wp.com hosting, and access to some features is adjusted via settings screens they supply. As I mentioned, I have posted here (screenshots of) the settings having to with commenting, and some had to do with signing in, but no relation to size of textbox form elements.
There are also some settings screens that definitely DO relate to matters the Theme controls. These are the settings panels called either Configuration or Appearance. And they provide access to things like the choice and placement of widgets in the sidebars; and the color scheme. Again, nothing having to do with the size of textbox form elements.
Nor the widths or ratios of the different inherent columns on the blog pages. These I suppose DO come from the Theme, as Kilby notes. However, they are not in the settings panels. They would be in the code, in the installed files, and we don’t have access to those. (If we had read access, we could perhaps find the CSS giving these dimensions, and put in some override. Not available for now, however.)
But it may be worthwhile experimenting with other themes. Not for the sake of this particular operational commenting problem, but if people think the appearance, and details of things like widget spaces, could stand a refresh, we could try out something different.
The theme we have now is called Editor, and it does have some very nice features. Bill made a good choice! What I like about it is the tabs on the left giving a choice of two different sidebars — so we can populate them with a bunch of stuff without crowding out the main content by trying to have two sidebars showing all the time.
But if you would like to suggest other themes, we can certainly take a look. Either by name (but these need to be available within WordPress.com, and need to be free — please don’t just pick from the huge catalogs), or by example — send link to a WP-based blog you think has a theme that could be used well here. (And if you want to be really nice and helpful, try asking the owner or author what their theme is.)
The reason that Bill made a (very) good choice with the current “theme” (except that he always called it a “template”) was that he went through a very long process of testing the various options. After testing several possibilities on the live site and collecting reader opinions, it coalesced fairly quickly that what we have now was the best of the available options. (The original CIDU setup [still visible on larK’s “comment harvester”] was no longer available for selection.)
For these reasons, I would not DREAM of re-opening that can of worms to go through that laborious process yet again. That headache would ONLY be worthwhile if we ever decide to “upgrade” to a higher “level”, but that involves finances and imposing (a little) on the Bickel family, which I also do not think is worth the trouble (neither for us nor for them).
The primary reason that I have mentioned this data input problem (several times) is that the current situation is a definite change from the way that the form used to appear and work. I cannot say whether reason that the data entry frame shrank to less than one line is due to a side-effect of the “theme” settings, or because some sort of insidious change made by wordpress in their website engine, or even perhaps an update made by Apple to the Safari browser. All I know is that I used to see a large, comfortable frame in which the text could be entered, and that is no longer the case. The fact that Firefox produces the same mini-window is a fairly clear indication that it was probably wordpress or a theme side effect, and not just Safari.
There have been updates to the WP core.
There have not been announced updates to the Editor theme.
Do you really think that these are then equally likely explanations?
Not that in either case could we have them retract the changes. So how does arguing that it is one or the other begin to help your situation.
I and others have made several suggestions on how you can avoid this problem. Are you thinking of trying one of these options? If not, why not?
If the microscopic data entry frame is a side effect of a wordpress change to their core, then there is nothing we can do about it, except possibly to complain to WordPress about how they have made their system less usable. However, WordPress has proven (multiple times) that they have a Teflon skin when it comes to user complaints, so that unlikely to help. The same applies to any “hidden” changes to the Editor theme, over which we have a similar ability to control (zero). The only potential exception would be investigating the possibility whether the recent configuration changes led to a side-effect, and seeing whether restoring the old configuration fixes the size of the window. However, since you do not feel that this has any chance of success, and are probably unwilling to try it, we will just have to live with the system as it currently is, or use one of the workarounds that you have proposed (with all of the attached advantages and disadvantages).
But there is no stored previous configuration.
Sometime in the past I have said that we have no administrative control over how the Akismet plugin handles spam. (As opposed to moderated comments, or Pending as WP calls it, where we do have several controls.) I just found a link which leads to the following area on an Akismet page:
The “display a privacy notice” option is what I just now activated, mostly to see that this controls page is for real. It is why you might be seeing “This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.” below the comment box. There is no list of strings or users to mark as spam.
QUERY to ALL READERS
I would make it a survey but that block seems to be available it posts and pages only, not in comments.
Here is a setting that might merit changing. Note that the “preview” section is like an example. Please comment on whether you would like to try having this “Show related” option turned on. I do see a lot of linking of previous CIDU posts.
It is now ON as a test.
I had noticed the “related” posts in the first one I read. At first I thought it was something from the strip source that got sucked in it. I don’t think think it hurts anything but so far the ones I’ve seen haven’t been all that useful either. I do see the Akismet notice.
I can expand the textbox vertically by just hitting ENTER (or Return) a few times. Then go back to top to start writing.
Some updates to sending in and processing comics
(Also posted to a thread under a post https://cidu.info/2022/11/29/some-updates-to-sending-in-and-processing-comics/ )
1) LOL and OY submissions automatically approved
We’re trying to promote the understanding of LOL and OY collection posts that they are reader-driven ideally. And apart from correcting duplications or filtering the not-safe-for-family, the editors are not going to be judgey about whether we think a sent-in comic is really funny or not, really a good wordplay or not. It’s more like anything-goes.
2) Classifications of cartoon send-ins actively sought
The classifications of cartoons we are mainly interested in receiving currently are:
CIDU — Comics you didn’t understand (duh). You don’t see a joke there or think you see where it is intended but just don’t get it. Not just a glaring mistake by the cartoonist (we can find some special place for those OOPSES!). And it’s fine if you sense the point you are missing must be due to some allusion to something you’re not familiar with — the editors will also see if it remains mysterious to them, and if so and it’s published as a stand-alone, commenters may help.
LOL — Comics you consider really funny! And that’s just by your subjective judgement. Any cartoon sent in under a LOL rubric will be used! The editors will not evaluate whether we also consider it highly funny. (But not totally automatic — don’t flood us with more than a handful at a given week; and no objectionable material.)
OY — A good old-fashioned “groaner” of a pun. Or really clever word-play, even if not precisely somebody’s definition of “pun”. And that’s just by your subjective judgement. Any cartoon sent in under an OY rubric will be used! The editors will not evaluate whether we also consider it highly punful or highly clever as wordplay. If we think it more a matter of funny, we may transfer it to LOL. (But posting will not be totally automatic — don’t flood us with more than a handful at a given week; and no objectionable material.)
These accept-anything-sincerely sent by readers policies are just carrying over something CIDU Bill was trying to use.
Yes, there will still be editor-selected OY and LOL cartoons in with the reader-sent ones.
Currently we are not looking for SYNCHRONICITY or EWWWW cartoons. It’s fine if a CIDU or LOL or OY has some EWWWW-ish aspects, but we just want to steer clear of “let’s see how disgusting these cartoonists can get!”
@ Dana K – That used to work for me, too, but it doesn’t any more. Which browser and operating system are you using? I’d be happy to test the behavior on setups other than the one I normally use.
Speaking of “Likes“, I recently discovered that I have been receiving e-mail notifications for them, but sent to my old “wordpress” e-mail address. For technical (and compatibility) reasons, that ancient address has become exceedingly tedious to read, so I guess I will have to supress the notification settings. I just wanted to mention that I do appreciate the support, but it’s only fair to warn the rest of you that “likes” are completely invisible to me.
P.S. @ Mitch – After testing it for several weeks now, I think the “related” section is interesting as visible nostalgia, but not especially useful. My vote would be to turn it off again.
Suggestions for the January subtitle tagline?
How about stealing a gag back from the earliest days of the (recently discontinued) “Washington Post Style Invitational”: “The Ear That No One Reads“.
Huh?
@ deety – Precisely. Mitch wants ideas to replace the line near the top of the menu in the left column, which currently refers to “Descender“. Not everyone notices that tagline. Similarly, the “ears” of a newspaper are (or were) the little boxes at the top left and top right of the front page (or first page of a section), frequently used in many papers for slogans, ads, or quick topical references. During the first few years of the SI, the “Czar” placed very amusing jokes in those “ears”, giving credit in the SI column to the reader who submitted them, but never telling anyone where they were to be found: you either knew it, or you didn’t. That’s why the credit line called them “the ears no one reads“.
Well, how about something more January-specific?
Think Janus:
asnowmouse
ǝsnoɯʍousɐ
Very nice palindrome + inversion !
My first contact with “umop-apisdn” text was in a Dr. Seuss book.
A visitor to the site asked, via the contact form
Our answer:
The site doesn’t support general email subscriptions, as such. If you make a comment in a thread, you can check a box which (when it’s working) will email you any subsequent comments in the same thread. Also, if you use Reader Mode at the Word Press site (https://wordpress.com/read and make a free account), you can Follow any WordPress-hosted sites, such as this one.
@ Mitch – That comment may have been questioning whether WordPress requires a subscription (or “login”) to participate, as is the case with many other social media sites. In many other cases, you can still read without “joining”, but they make it a lot easier to participate if you do sign up. The process of setting up a WordPress account is not at all transparent, so it might be worthwhile to provide a short summary or a link to WP in the CIDU FAQ.
P.S. I was pleased to discover that the WP-Login that I created for CIDU also allowed me to comment without any trouble at all on Maggie the Cartoonist‘s new WP site.
On behalf of the entire CIDU community, I would like to offer thanks to larK for adjusting some performance issues in his “CIDU comment scraper“, which were caused the ever increasing size of the CIDU archive. I just hope that the CIDU traffic is not costing larK any additional expenses.
Yes indeed, many thanks to larK!
It’s a bit embarrassing to realize I haven’t examined our site layout in a while. And I belatedly realized that we do have a “follow by email” subscribe widget! It’s at the bottom of the second lefthand sidebar, the one headed by the tab with the file folder icon.
Does anyone know if it works okay?
🤭
@ Mitch – That feature has no difficulty accepting an e-mail address, and as soon as a new post appears, I’ll tell you whether the notification works, but at the moment I can’t see any way to unsubscribe from the notifications.
@ Mitch – After entering my e-mail address in that CIDU subscription widget, I have not received any notifications of new posts. However, the address I used was different from the (de facto defunct) address that my WP login is still attached to, so it may not be a fair test.
P.S. @ Editors – I would like to thank whoever deactivated the “related posts” feature in the CIDU
templatetheme. It simply took up too much real estate for the low level of usefulness. I don’t know how long it has been gone: I just noticed it this morning.We didn’t initiate any change in that regard. Whether you are presented with that feature depends on how you are viewing a post. They are not present when you go to the CIDU home page and the scroll shows you just the posts (not the comment threads). They reappear if you follow a link for one post and get a screen of that post plus its comment thread. (Or in WP’s Reader mode, I think.)
Thank you for trying to accommodate to WP’s technical vocabulary!
@ Mitch – It appears that they may only appear from the links in “recent comments”. Unfortunately, there’s a new incompatibility (or caching problem) with the “folder” menu on my old Mac. All I see when I click on the “folder” icon is “#tab-3” added to the URL, the menu hasn’t appeared on my system for at least a month. (It does show up without any problem when I read on one of my more modern systems.) Therefore, on this desktop I have been forced to rely on larK’s comment scraper, which seems to avoid the related posts as well. Sometimes a bug is a useful feature.
P.S. As for “template”, that too is an old CIDU Bill tradition: it’s the work that he always used for that piece of technology. I did not come up with that term myself.
CALL FOR HOLIDAY-THEMED CONTENT
Please help the editors assemble holiday-themed posts for MOTHERS’ DAY (Sunday 14 May) and MEMORIAL DAY (Monday 29 May).
All sorts of cartoon material is welcome!
Submit suggestions by email ( CIDU.Submissions@gmail.com ) or via our webform ( https://cidu.info/suggest-a-cidu/ ) .
Thanks!
@ Mitch – If you really want to make sure that everyone sees your “Call For … Content“, you might consider putting it into a separate post, so that it will remain visible in the “Recent Posts” menu (which has a slower turnover than “Recent Comments” does).
P.S. If you were worried that people might embed their suggested comics in such a post, you can always disable the comments there.
@ Mitch wrote: “Should [Recent Comments] be moved to a different location? Made shorter, or longer?” (Adding a reference copy of this reply here in Site Comments):
Anyone who might be unaware of the “Recent Comments” list (tucked underneath the “Folder” icon in the upper left corner) can still use larK’s Comment Index, which is linked underneath the primary “Three Lines” icon. While it would be wonderful if “Recent Comments” could provide more than 15 links (larK’s index provides 30 by default), back when Bill looked into expanding it, he discovered that 15 was the maximum allowed by wordpress (or perhaps by the WP plan that CIDU has).
If you are interested in simplifying the “Folder” menu, I would recommend getting rid of the meaningless “clouds” near the end (neither the “categories” nor “tags” are all that useful), and clean out the “blog roll”: Jimmy Johnson’s blog is dead, Bug Martini is highly irregular, and with Funky Winkerbean gone, I think we can dispense with the snark.
I’ve always used LarK’s, because there are often way more comments that I haven’t read than will fit in the Recent list. Also, the list is formatted so that traversed links are not in a different color, so I can’t tell when one has been clicked.
@ Brian – I think the “followed” link color used to work at CIDU, but that may have been only on the old (pre-meltdown, green) theme/template, which larK borrowed for his comment scraper page. I’m not sure whether the Editors have the power to re-activate that feature, or whether it would require editing the site’s CSS settings (the current WP plan for CIDU does not allow CSS modifications).
Test
test 2
I wasn’t complaining nor think you should do anything. I would probably keep using LarK’s site because I’m used to it.
At the moment I am forced to use larK’s index on my primary “comic reader” desktop, because there is a script or cache issue that prevents this browser from opening the folder menu. This does not affect any of our mobile devices, nor my “secondary desktop” downstairs.
@ Editors – Something appears to have disabled the “post author’s” name in the CIDU display. All that is shown now is “[1]”. Is this a bug, or a “feature”?
Thanks for spotting. As you know (but I am informing the group at large) we are trying to work on this over email.
some almost-unrelated points:
1) The [1] marker is a link, and clicking it will a) reveal an allcaps note like AUTHOR/MULTICIDUERS b) display a search-like result list, like what it does for Tag or Category markers, of all the posts marked as by that author
2) While I was changing the ill-chosen sub-heading tag, I did a little playing around with font size and style, I think mostly for display items. Let us know if these are more like helpful or in-the-way.
3) A discovery! Although overall plan upgrades still must be handled by the account that owns the site/çurrent plan, they have changed some of the rules so that anybody (or any Administrator, or something) can buy an Add-On, and one of those Add-Ons is Additional CSS. Which I did buy / subscribe! When I dig out the CSS provided by larK for numbered comments, let’s give that a whirl!
Comment numbering — Done!
The comments list in a thread is at some level of the HTML treated as a LI (list), and the CSS to have the numbering appear (actually, overriding some CSS that suppresses it) will also affect other things that are implemented as HTML lists. So be on the lookout for newly hatched oddities and let us know.
Looking over some past discussions of possibly useful Additional CSS, I see a small tweak that might restore in this Theme the distinction between visited and unvisited links. Would that be worth trying? What colors?
Sigh. Already with the first issue surrounding this. When a thread gets more than a certain number of comments (apparently 50) the display will break onto a new page for the next batch. It turns out the numbering starts fresh with 1 in that circumstance. So Random Comments for example has 234 comments at the moment — but jump to the end and you don’t see one numbered 234.
This one here, for example, would be something like 235 overall, but is showing 46.)
Testing what happens when you specifically do lists.
Test ordered:
And testing unordered list:
and some more text below all of that.
Bah humbug!
@ Mitch – If I am commenting from a mobile device, then I don’t have access to that e-mail address (which is “desktop only”), so all of this was a (relative) surprise to me.
Page break comment limit changed.
@ Mitch – Did you eliminate the limit entirely, or just increase the number?
Just to note: as you change the page break limit number, my scraped links may become [more] inaccurate if they point to a page number that no longer exists (as happened in this thread).
The scraped links for threads that have broken up into pages has always been wonky, but now, in addition to maybe having to add a number to the page number in the URL, you might also have to subtract a number.
This should not continue to be an issue moving forward once you settle on a new page break limit for new scraped links, but the old links already scraped may be affected.
@ Mitch – After all that experimentation, the new configuration looks very good, with some definite improvements over the old look. The rollover link colors seem to work, although I would prefer a different set for the final version. The comment numbers AND the elimination of the 50-comment limit is a big plus. My objection to the position of the comment numbers turned out to be a rotational issue on my iPad in Portrait mode. On the desktop and in landscape mobile mode everything is fine.
The BEST change is the design of the new sans serif font. I have no idea what you chose, but it looks much better and is more easily readable than the (temporary) serif font, but it is even better than the original sans serif font that CIDU had before. THANKS!
Sorry to throw a Spaniard in the works!
I increased the page break count for comments, not entirely turning it off. It’s now at 360, a nice round number.
I had noticed that the links on LarK’s page were going nowhere. At least I knew there were comments here and went to the link from the sidebar.
And now the missing author id’s have been restored. Not from any action taken, that I am aware of.
The ghosts in the WP machine seem to have been teasing us fairly severely, but it doesn’t seem fair to complain, given that you discovered the magic CSS wand because of it.
@ Mitch (154) – I know that 360 has an ancient (and hot, and round) tradition, but if the comment numbers are going to wrap at that point, please save us from the math. For instance, you could equally have “gon” full circle with 400. 🙂
P.S. One of Bill’s old Random Comments threads actually made it to 473 comments before he retired it.
Late last month (on 6.28) there was a nerd holiday of Tau Day.
I very much enjoyed the Birthday Memorial CIDU edition. Obviously a labor of love. However, it did have one unexpected side effect for me. When viewing those vintage cartoons it was very interesting to see how the styles changed. Which leads me to suggest a possible category readers might enjoy. Editors familiar with the history of a strip could occasionally post a time series along with observations on changes.
Well y’know what — I’d also enjoy something like that as an occasional guest-edited contribution. We’re learning how that can be done.
I wonder also if some of the columns at The Daily Cartoonist might fit with what you have in mind. Or even moreso, the Stripper’s Guide, which is always taking an historical outlook. I first started seeing the Stripper’s Guide because a vintage strip I was trying to find the attribution for was discussed in their Obscurity of the Day feature. I got momentarily excited to think that their idea of “obscure” could be another name for what we think of as “Don’t Understand” — but it turns out they mean an artist or strip not very well known today, one which might be now considered obscure. But that opens up quite a historical perspective.
Try for example the recent, 2023 June 05, entry “Obscurity of the Day, Revisited: Jon Jason”, which takes an approach along the lines you suggest. (I can’t seem to extract a direct link, but you could go to their obscurities category listing and scroll down about a foot.)
@ Dale (161) – Well, that too, but mostly respect, not just for the way Bill developed the website, but also for his moderatorial skill, which has resulted in a standard of politeness and camaraderie that I have yet to encounter in any other Internet forum.
Danny, personally that”s more like what I keep expecting from CIDU-tagged cartoons! (However I’m not someone to be demanding about it.)
Here for instance is something retro from the current posting at Stripper’s Guide.
@ Mitch (156) – Did WP ever admit to some sort of bug or other effect that caused the whole “author credit” problem? Or were they just phishing around, hoping to stir up admins to adjust their WP websites and book new features?
P.S. Last night I ran into some strange problems on the Random Comments post: the system reported that the page could not be loaded. I had to try several times before I could get it back.
The cause might have been the page numbering issue that larK reported, but I have also noticed any post with lots of comments, embedded graphics, and (most especially) too many embedded YouTube videos takes a much longer time to render with the newly increased “comments per page” setting. I think it might be better to compromise, and reduce the setting back to 200 (or even 100), but then open up a fresh “Random Comments” and “Site Comments” pages whenever either one of them gets up to (about) 190 comments.
I don’t think we are better off tinkering too often with parameters that have side effects for systems like larK’s links. But I agree it’s time for a fresh pair of Random Comments and Site Comments. Indeed,it’s been on a to.do list for a week or more, but with low priority. Sorry, I just need to take the time to get all the loose ends into a checklist.
@ Mitch – There really isn’t any need to hurry. I would vote for a logical start date, such as August (or even September) first, rather than having them appear on some random date.
I have an idea for an improvement. Move (or maybe copy) the prior post/previous post links to the bottom of the page.
Now, I refresh the main page when I open my tablet, click on the top link, read the page, then scroll back up to the top to find the prior day’s link. Scroll to the bottom to read new comments (unless I didn’t visit the page yesterday). Then scroll back to the top to find the link to the day before.
But if it’s a Saturday or Sunday, or other day with multiple comics, I have to search around a little for the link.
If it was at the bottom, it would always be at the bottom.
Thanks for giving the layout some thought, Todd. Short of choosing and activating a new Theme (as Word Press calls the parts of the system that specify and implement the design and layout) the parameters that we have control over are quite limited.
I cannot rule out the possibility that wordpress may have released some new themes that might be slightly better than what we have now, but I remember quite vividly that after the server meltdown in 2018, which forced Bill to redesign the CIDU site practically from scratch, the process of selecting an acceptable theme was rather difficult, as the previous theme was no longer available. I would not want to put the CIDU readership through that selection purgatory again.
P.S. @ Mitch (171) – Now that we’ve returned to (effectively) unlimited page length, the one new feature that I would really like to have would be a button at the top of the post, which would jump all the way to the bottom of the comments. Scrolling down is no problem at all on either of the desktop systems I use, but whenever I read a long thread on a mobile device, it is sometimes quite difficult to swipe all the way down to the “enter new comment” dialog.
Ah, the eternal dilemma of trade-offs! When we had relatively short page breaks, the good advice to readers and commenters was to click on the place where it says (for instance) “215 comments” and it would take you right to the last page of comments. But actually that meant THE TOP of the last page of comments. Which was pretty useful when the pages were short, but not as much now.
By accident I have discovered that Gary Larson has lost his sense of humor and any regard for the established principles behind “fair use”. As of 27-July-2023, WordPress has summarily deleted all “Far Side” content appearing in all CIDU posts from Sat-17-Dec-2022 to Sat-1-July-2023 (inclusive). Presumably FarWorks is continuing to survey the CIDU website and will issue additional DMCA requests in the future. For this reason, I suggest that “Larson” and “Far Side” should be added to the list of CIDU moderation triggers, and we should refrain from posting and discussing Larson’s work in any form.
“Some content on this page was disabled on July 27, 2023 as a result of a DMCA takedown notice from FarWorks, Inc….“
There are significant penalties for false DMCA takedowns.
@ Dave (176) – What would be a “false” takedown? For this case, I have no doubt that WordPress was contacted by FarWorks, Larson has been very outspoken about the ways in which his intellectual property has been abused, despite the fact that a large part of the problem is that he completely ignored the issue for at least two decades. If he had set up a (monetized) website back then (such as what Andertoons has now), the propagation of illegal copies would never have gotten so out of hand.
A false takedown notice is primarily if you don’t own the copyright. Fair Use is an affirmative defense, you have ti be accused of copyright violation, and then you can say, no, I have a Fair Use exemption, and the whole thing supposedly goes away. Sadly, especially with DMCA, the whole thing is skewed way too much in favor of the big corporations, who don’t get penalized when they do do mass take down requests, even when they don’t actually own the copyrights (“Oops!”) (what you’d see if you tried to complain about United Features and their most likely expired copyright of 1950s Nancys…) , and the big pain in the tuckas it is for people like us who are pretty clearly within the Fair Use exception, only we have to affirmatively prove it… We could do it, but on a case by case basis, and each time would involve hours and hours of legal time.
@ larK – Why should anyone bother to spend even ten seconds of work to provide Larson with additional exposure or any kind of passive advertising? If he wants to restrict everything related to The Far Side to his private little emporium, that’s his privilege, but he should consider how well that strategy worked for Scott Adams.
P.S. @175 – Update: The DMCA takedown imposed by WordPress has affected isolated CIDU posts as far back as 8-April-2020. Although CIDU is almost certainly within the principles of Fair Use, establishing this fact would require far more effort than the matter is worth. To avoid any further legal hassles, all Far Side images have now been removed from all CIDU posts (text and comments have been left unchanged).
As mitch noted in the “Drs. Woof and Yogi” thread: “the submission form has changed”
On those systems where wordpress’s new comment entry form works, it is a massive improvement:
On the other hand, I have one Mac desktop and two older iPads that do not qualify: on those systems wordpress teasingly displays “Add a Comment”, but there is no entry field in which to do so:
It’s going to be difficult to take a poll on how many CIDU readers are affected by this compatibility bug, since those who are affected cannot answer.
Here are the current Discussion-related settings, for CIDU. By “discussion”, WP means “commenting”.
Does it disturb anybody that we have been seeing more anonymous comments lately? I think generally this has happened when someone simply forgets to fill in their name, or the form doesn’t give them a chance before processing. But we could tick one of these checkboxes to change that, if felt to be needed.
The bit about 6 links actually means 3, as in most circumstances each one counts twice.
BTW, we do now have just a little control over the Akismet anti-spam agent. Here is the modest settings page.
It also gives some stats. The false-positive rate looks satisfactory, as a rate. But the absolute count is unfortunate, and still requires a lot of manual attention.
I noticed the new system. It was a bit non-intuitive to click the email icon if you didn’t want to log in.
@ Brian (185) – Even less intuitive is the fact that if you click the e-mail icon, the other two turn “gray”, but they are still active and can be chosen (if you change your mind).
For those who may not have seen it, here’s what the comment entry dialog looks like, after you start typing text into the field:
And another annoying detail is that many of these unintentional Anonymous comments get thrown into Pending (“moderation”) that would have been directly published if seen by the system to have come from well-established regular commenters. It’s annoying to the commenters to have to wait to see their remarks posted ; and annoying to editors/moderators to have to remain on the qui vive even during “off hours”.
@ mitch (187) – For those who don’t have (nor want) a wordpress login and ID, I think it would be better to go back to the old CIDU requirement that they need to supply both an alias (shown) and their e-mail address (never shown). Yes, this may lead to some difficulties with wordpress’s new tridentite comment form, but once everyone gets used to that, it will reduce both misunderstandings (“who wrote that?“) and the moderation workload.
P.S. Another change that I would really like is to uncheck the option for that inane “Akismet” privacy notice. Nobody ever reads it, and most of those who do (myself included) will never understand nor need the advertising drivel on that page. The sentence (with the link) could be moved to the CIDU FAQ, so that the space-wasting message can be removed from the comment form.
@ Kilby — re login or email requirements on commenting — Yes, and I was suggesting this back in comment 184 on 24 DubStepEmber. “Does it disturb anybody that we have been seeing more anonymous comments lately? I think generally this has happened when someone simply forgets to fill in their name, or the form doesn’t give them a chance before processing. But we could tick one of these checkboxes to change that, if felt to be needed.” (This was a comment, available if you scroll up a little, in which I posted a screenshot of the “Discussion” settings.)
Let’s try requiring a “name” and email address, but not a WP login. (And for pity’s sake, not a Facebook login, however in heck that got into the mix!!) .
The Akismet notice needs to stay!! There’s no reason to complain about what you get when you follow the link, since there is nothing making you follow the link. But it is very useful to remind people that there are multiple ways their submitted comment may not be appearing immediately, and that one of them is mostly automatic and not much adjustable by the editors.
Okay, the name-and-email requirement is now restored. (“Name” is of course not required to be verifiable or anything — just an alias is fine, but not a blank.)
Let’s give it a couple days, and see how it affects people.
Here is that screenshot:
Testing the comment form — except it has me already signed in via WP
All right, new window and not logged in.
It says log in optional. What if I just don’t ?
Grrrr! It didn’t get posted, but did show up in Pending to annoy me!
Again, after giving it a chance to settle in.
Ah! “Error: Please fill the required fields.” But not friendly about getting me back to what I had written! Also doesn’t say what the required fields are.
Now will try with an ad hoc email and name.
@ mitch (189) – I very purposely did not reply to you back then @184, for several reasons:
1) I wasn’t sure how this would affect all the other people who do not use a WP login ID, and didn’t want to recommend an immediate change, before we had had some time to see how the new WP dialog works. I had similar doubts about the effects on moderation efforts.
2) At that time the frequency of “Anonymous” comments had become noticeable, but had not yet become a nuisance. That has since changed: hardly a post goes by without at least one nameless comment.
3) I wanted to give other people a chance to respond before I weighed in.
@Kilby, it sounds like you are responding to some complaint like “Why did you wait so long?” or “Why are you weighing in so late?”. But my point was only that my 184 was probably a better locus for background than my 187 which you mentioned; and to remind readers that we’ve been looking at this development for about a week now, so it’s time to try out some modifications.
@ mitch – I am relieved that it was just a misunderstanding. As it happens, there is yet another reason for my delayed replies: we have a fairly large selection of Apple devices (desktops, iPads, and iPhones) around our house, but a precise count reveals that exactly half of them have been rendered mute at CIDU by the limited compatibility of wordpress’s new comment entry form.
P.S. I just discovered that you (mitch) commented on the Daily Cartoonist’s “Friday Fallacy Round-Up”. That website appears to uses wordpress too (it has exactly the same Akismet warning), but it provides the same old user-friendly Alias + E-Mail (+ optional website) that CIDU used to have. Is there a chance that we could get that kind of entry form working again at CIDU?
Well, it took nearly two weeks (and a new user ID on a different laptop), but I finally figured out why the CIDU website refuses to let me use the “e-mail & alias” option for commenting: it’s not CIDU’s fault at all. It’s simply because I am still using the same address that is attached to my wordpress account, and WP requires a login for it, because that WP account is currently in use (on a different system). It’s time to switch to a different e-mail address. Unfortunately, this may require a new WP account (or alias).
It appears that WordPress has introduced a brand-new incompatibility. On all of the devices for which the new comment import form does not work, it has now become impossible to access the “folder” menu in the upper left corner of the window. The problem is independent of browser (both Safari & Firefox are affected).
Thanks, WP – why can’t you just leave a working system running the way it used to?
TECH CHECK – GEOGRAPHIC
We have heard from a regular reader unable to reach the site, even under different browsers or different forms of the address.
On the off chance that it depends on geography, or network provider, could we ask for confirmation from any reader IN CANADA who is able to read this entry?
Thanks!
Recently wordpress has added an annoying new feature: after clicking on “Reply” to submit a comic, instead of refreshing the page, it displays a dialog that says “Never miss a beat! Interested in getting blog post updates? Simply click the button below to stay in the loop!” I have absolutely no interest in e-mail updates. Is there a way to disable this new idiocy?
P.S. I find it especially nasty that the dialog has no “cancel” or “escape” option, it appears as if the only way out is to click on “Subscribe”. Refreshing the browser page does make it go away, but that’s something that one has to know (or guess).
Ha. I came here to ask about the same issue.
Oh, I see that Kilby’s comment was from a couple of weeks ago. A slow rollout?
We gather that WP is doing a lot of tinkering with these forms. Seen on other sites that we follow, too.
@ Brian (202) – After I reported it (@201), the dialog did not make another appearance until today, but someone appears to have noticed that not offering a “cancel” option was not kosher: the newly reappeared dialog had a little “close” X in the upper right corner.
I’d like to sincerely thank whoever it was that composed the last two subheaders (in the menu column underneath the CIDU title). Back in summer I was starting to get rather tired of the ironclad uniformity of “gags based on the name of the month“, but “Nov. is the winter of our discontent” was brilliant, and Kelly’s “Boston Charlie” is perfect for the “holiday” season.
Although it has produced a few interesting links from time to time, I’m not really a big fan of the “related posts” feature. However, I really don’t like the repetition that is happening now:
@ Boise Ed asked (@7) in the “Yes, Virginia” thread: “Who pays for the costs of this site? Is there some way we can chip in to help with that?“:
Mitch has approached Robin several times (on behalf of the entire CIDU community) about assuming responsibility for CIDU hosting expenses, but the reason that nobody has passed the hat yet is that Robin has never accepted any of these offers. I think she may consider it her contribution to the CIDU website as an ongoing memorial to Bill, but I agree with you; I’d feel better if we were picking up the tab.
On the other hand, the same question came up a number of times during Bill’s lifetime; in particular when he decided to eliminate the advertisements at the bottom of the left-column menu, because they were becoming far more trouble than the small amount of loose change that they produced.
One reason that Bill cited back then for not asking CIDU participants to help defray hosting costs was his gratitude for the (significant) contributions that CIDU produced for the March of Dimes and (later) the CMT fundraising drives.
This is not an “official” solution (I have not discussed this with Robin, nor with Mitch†), but if you (or anyone else) is feeling guilty for not paying for the enjoyment that CIDU provides, my suggestion would be to make a contribution to CMT in Robin Bickel‘s name. Robin indicated in her latest message that she would be sending out an e-mail next summer about a CMT bike-a-thon scheduled for September 2024.
If you can’t wait that long, it will take a little persistence and personal ingenuity: Mary Cate had an official CMT fundraising page, but the link has expired and does not work any more.
P.S. @208 (†) – In fairness to Mitch I should mention that he covered the cost for an optional WordPress “extra feature” out of his own pocket. This was how he was able to reinstate the comment numbering that CIDU had before Comicgeddon, but which was not available by default in the resurrected format doohickey (Mitch insists on the WP terminology “theme”; Bill always referred to it as the “template”).
P.P.S. @ larK – A similar issue may (or may not) exist for Comment Scraper, which a fair number of CIDU readers make use of. My understanding has been that this runs more-or-less as insignificant overhead on a pre-existing server, but if larK is footing an extra amount for the resulting bandwidth, we might consider adding that to the CIDU hosting tab.
Kilby: that is correct, there are no significant extra costs in my running the scraper; and anyway, it’s a tool I built primarily for myself, so as long as I’m here, I’ll want it for myself, so no need to worry about it. (And I’m happy for others to use it too!)
I am late in seeing this new comment form from WP, which is block-editor oriented.
Could we get a couple people to test out choosing an Image block and then uploading from your local device? This may obviate the rather tedious procedure and rules for embedding an image in a comment that we’ve evolved and described!
Ehhh, no 😦
All it offers is “From URL” which is essentially where we were before. Though spared the fuss of making a newline, and using the right kind of filename extension..
Guero asks (in a thread from a comic post) “So html tags no longer work?”
My answer was “Guero, it depends on the editing interface you land in. But yes, WordPress has made changes to the comment-writing tool that gets invoked when you were reading in standard web-browser mode”
And further “… (As I am now using) This is like (a reduced version of) the block-oriented editor used by their post-creation editing tool.
Though it does not accept HTML markup, this mode does have some minimal styling tools while you are in a Paragraph block. You can get italic and bold via a couple quick buttons. In Paragraph you also can use text-align, and links.
Another block type is Image, but this accepts only URLs, not uploads from your local device. So in effect this accomplishes what we have been doing under our own term of “embedding an image”. They do also have a block type called Embed, which asks for a website URL — I haven’t seen just what it does, but it’s not the way to accomplish what we have been calling embedding an image — as noted, that is now via an Image block.
There are also specialized embed blocks, for example for Twitter.
Note copied from a comics thread, about synchronicities.
Powers said
You don’t publish syncronicities anymore? Now what am I going to do with the one I’ve been trying to remind myself to submit for five years?I replied: @Powers, don’t worry, if it’s interesting there will be a way to use it — as you see in today’s instance. We just aren’t counting them as a main category of encouraged submissions, alongside OY, LOL, and especially CIDU. (BTW, OY and LOL submissions are pretty much all accepted without question and used pretty soon in a list-post; whereas for CIDU submissions headed for a standalone daily post, we may circulate some discussion with you, to see if we together end up understanding it after all.)
Another stupidity of the WP block editor (at least under iOS) is that it makes it impossible to mark text in two separate paragraphs in one operation. Have those WP idiots ever considered that every time they change things around for “expert” users, they are making it increasingly difficult for normal readers to use the system? Dimwits.
Now that the CSS is under CIDU’s control, is there any chance that the point size of
<blockquote>Blockquote Text</blockquote>
…could be reducted from “gigantic” to be just “large”?
P.S. Nuts. The new WP block editor doesn’t include any easy way to demonstrate what the blockquote tag used to do to the text.
Well, you said it: “used to do”. Not a problem anymore, then, is it?
I wonder if they are just not thinking in a mode like someone in a scholarly tradition, using a quotation to develop or defend a point; but rather are in a pop culture way, where there are “inspirational quotes” up on posters in offices. And having a bright, large typeface might come from that use.
Even if a reason can be established as to why WordPress selected a particular font, this does not change the fact that 30 to 36 points makes “blockquote” hideously oversized for use at CIDU.
So, don’t walk that way!
(In response to a comment in a thread, expressing the wish of leaving a Like for a certain preceding comment.)
@Patrick, the Like buttons and display of number collected are not by default visible in this interface (classic web browser window or tab to the single site). But they could be turned on; the times we have tried that, however, they were massively rejected by most of the readership. The general feeling expressed was that those sorts of mechanism can end up promoting competition and working against coöperation and camaraderie.
However, they do exist underlyingly, and can be seen in the WP Reader view (web browse to https://wordpress.com/read — or, lately, they seem to be forcing the use of something called the Jetpack app). For that view you need to have signed up for a WordPress account, though a free one will work so it is not terribly burdensome. You select the blogs you want to follow, and it will display recent posts (and accompanying comments) from those. These are presented in a uniform styling which does not use the Theme (“template”, “local stylings”) from those WP blogs. Thus, for example, comments made as replies to previous comments are displayed indented, regardless of whether the blog in question uses that feature.
Also — to get back to the original point! — the WordPress Reader view shows Like buttons for posts and for comments, and the number of Likes an item has received. In some circumstances it also shows usernames of those who have voted a Like.
The downsides of WP Reader for many users include (1) that it removes the styling Themes for the individual blogs, which can be an appealing part of the reading experience; and (2) it throws everything into one feed for you, interfering with the idea of following a train of thought thru a series of posts and comments. They in turn add back in some tools for doing that (e.g. subscribing to a “conversation”), but for many users it remains a diminished or at any rate confused experience. But it’s there if you want to try it; and does record your Likes and even notifies the poster or commenter.
Testing whether new comments will post, while WordPress.com has networking problems
Today’s post on “Cat & Girl” is prompting me to subscribe before I’m allowed to see the content of the post or any comments on it.
Sorry, Powers, I hope it was the stray “Access” setting I just found and corrected. Would you mind trying again.
There was a broken comment scraped that broke my scraper site; it had only “/comments#-” as a link, and no name for the poster. In my haste to get my site to stop showing an error message, I just deleted it from the database, but now I sorta wish I’d copied all the data so I could figure out what the heck it was. Maybe it had something to do with the “Access” setting Mitch alludes to?
It works now for me.
Thanks, Powers!
larK, here is a summary list of the comments posted in this thread this morning
powers at 6:30AM “Today’s post …”
mitch4 at 8:05AM “sorry, Powers”
powers at 9:52AM “It works now for me”