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Redesigned site to go live Friday afternoon
September 10, 2010 | 10:53 am
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By Paul Biba
On Friday, September 10, 2010 around 5pm EDT, TeleRead’s new site design should go live.
Hopefully, it will point you to articles that interest you in a way we can’t do now. I’ve asked that we incorporate a “real” search function and to cater to our international readers. The new look will also allow us to be more advertiser-friendly, which is important if the site is to remain viable and grow even more than it has to date.
Some of you will love the site, and I’m sure some of you won’t – that’s just the way people are. But when we are up and running I will be very interested in your constructive criticism and we will make every effort to tailor and refine the site to your interests. There may also be glitches and problems, and please bring these to my attention as well.
The new TeleRead site design is cleaner and we believe much easier to navigate. Some new features include a section of news from “Around the Web,” surveys for some free stuff and special discounts, and a way to interact with us and many others using Twitter.
At the commencement of the new site design we will also be implementing ReCaptcha for comments. This is in the nature of an experiment and if it doesn’t help our spam load, or it becomes too burdensome to our readers, we will be very willing to change it.
Thank you again for your continued support of TeleRead.
Paul Biba
Editor-in-Chief
TeleRead
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Comments:
I hate captchas. I often have to enter these 2 or 3 times because the pictures are ambiguous. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt for now, but I will look very critical at it.
Have you considered/tried Akismet to prevent spam?
On my own WordPress site I use WP Captcha Free (which does not use captchas) and Akismet and it killed all spam. Your site will most probably be more vulnerable but it would be worth trying.
We use Akismet. Someone still has to go through all the spam Akismet captures to look for false positives. A number of comments regularly get caught in the spam trap, and the only way to rescue them is to go through each message to find those that aren’t spam.
I just checked the spam box right now, and found 397 spams received just between 8:30 p.m. and 5:00 a.m.—and that’s one of the more quiet parts of the day. That’s 20 pages of spam to go through in search of 1 or 2 “good” comments that may not even be there at all. And we’re getting pummeled like that all the time.
If we can eliminate a significant portion of that spam before it starts, we can cut down the time we have to spend hunting for false positives, and spend it on more useful things like writing and administering the site.
As Paul said, we’re going to try it out and see how it goes. If it hurts more than it helps, we’ll scrap it and try something else.
Anticipation
and I hope we can drive forward with the new site to increase the number of posters. The number of posts seems to have slowed recently ad some times it feels like a very quiet and empty place …..
Well, our next goal is to get a full set of forums running.
Of course Paul – I am slightly concerned that the format we take part in now camouflages the real number of participants in a way that a bog standard forum does not .. if you get my drift.
Most sites that redesign, I stop visiting.
1. longer to load.
2. harder to find real content.
3. harder to post.
There is one annoying “feature” that started to manifest itself yesterday. That green strip at the bottom of the page that pops up and says “Powered by wibiya”
This is as bad as an animated banner would be. It distracts.
Fortunately, I have discovered long ago how to deal with such “features”. I just install “yes script” plugin to the Firefox and put teleread.com at the blacklist.
If I wasn’t able to get rid of it, I would have ceased to visit Teleread.