Important Announcement: Techdirt Is Migrating To A New Platform
from the big-changes-behind-the-scenes dept
UPDATE: If you’re reading this, you’re looking at the new Techdirt! If you have an account, you will need to reset your password before logging in. You may experience some bugs and slow performance for the next several hours while we complete the migration. Contact us if you notice any major issues.
Almost since its inception, Techdirt has been run on a custom content management system that we’ve built, expanded, and maintained ourselves. Once upon a time this had its advantages, but lately it’s been an obstacle to developing the new features and improvements we’d like to add for our readers. So for the past two years we’ve been working on a huge project: migrating the entire site, and its history of over 75,000 posts and millions of comments, to WordPress ? and now we’re ready to make the switch. We’ve worked hard to ensure the transition is as seamless as possible, but there will be a few changes, and those of you with accounts will need to reset your passwords. This post outlines what’s going to happen during the transition this weekend, and what you can expect to see when the site changes some time this Sunday evening.
First of all, a note about what this is not: it’s not a Techdirt redesign. For the time being, the changes are primarily on the back-end and the site will look and work just the way it does now with only a few exceptions, the biggest of which is a significant overhaul and upgrade to the comments section. That’s the one part of the site that will look quite different, and work much better: it can now handle deeply-nested threads without becoming unreadable, and there’s a handy new tool for navigating lengthy comment sections. All the features you’re used to, like Funny/Insightful voting, reporting, and First Word/Last Word will continue to work just as they do now.
Another important note is that all posts and comments are being retained, and all old post URLs will continue to work. It was extremely important to us that we not lose any content, or break any links ? even though the URL structure for posts is changing, old links will continue to work just fine and be redirected to the appropriate page.
And, of course, all user accounts and membership subscriptions are being retained as well. However, as noted, all users will have to reset their passwords before logging in to the new system. It’s also possible that you might have to reset your display name, profile picture, and account preferences, though we’ve tried to ensure that these things are all properly copied as well. We’ll make sure there’s a prominent notice on Techdirt reminding you once the switch is complete.
Amidst all this, there will likely be some unforeseen hiccups. We’ll have prominent links to our contact form, and a special feedback category for issues with the website migration, for you to report any problems with your own account or the site in general. This is a massive migration and we’re hopeful that problems will be minimal, but please bear with us as we work to fix anything that does go wrong!
As for the migration itself, shortly after this post we’ll be locking down Techdirt for a few days ? you’ll still be able to read and navigate the site, but you won’t be able to submit comments or create new accounts, and any comment votes or changes to user preferences will not be saved. We also won’t be publishing the normal weekend posts. New membership subscription purchases will still be accepted and recorded, but won’t be activated until Monday when the new site is live.
We’re extremely excited to be finally making this change ? it makes Techdirt much more manageable and maintainable for our small team, and lays the foundation for the site to improve and grow in the future. Stay tuned for another announcement when the new site is live, and thanks in advance to all our readers for your patience and support as we complete this migration.
Filed Under: migration
Comments on “Important Announcement: Techdirt Is Migrating To A New Platform”
Looks like it works.
Up and running. Good job, folks!
Re: Mega props.
Love the update. It still retained the original style but has a more modern feel. Plus you migrated everything. Amazing! Also thanks for keeping the whole article in the RSS feed.
Oh good, y’all didn’t completely break my userstyle. 🤣
Congrats on the smooth transition! 🎉
Re:
…okay, not entirely smooth, I’m missing about two years’ worth of comments on my profile page. 😅 (Also: Hey, glad to see the Twemoji here!)
Re: Re:
Hah – funny thing, yours was the account that initially made us notice a comment import bug, due to that exact gap. And we fixed it! And… apparently it has broken again.
Sorry about that – looking into it now, the comments will be back soon!
Re: Re: Re:
That is somehow both wonderful and terrifying. 🤣
Re: Re: Re:2
Well, we needed a prolific commenter to use as a test case while working out the import hiccups 🙂
Update: the comments ARE still there on the posts (or at least, the first few I checked are). Not sure why they are not appearing on your profile page, but we’re on it.
Re: Re: Re:3 Other Issues
Well, if I can use this thread to report some wonky issues: The new comments-on-profiles system seems to have issues with displaying multi-line comments, in that what should be paragraph elements in the HTML aren’t showing up that way.
Also, subject lines for comments don’t seem able to correctly parse apostrophes and quotation marks—include “smart quotes”. Caught that in a comment preview before posting.
Re: Re: Re:4 Straight Quote: " Curly Quote: “ Straight Apostrophe: ' Accented a: á
Any character issues or line-break in existing comments and posts should hopefully be fixed sometime in the next 24 hours or less – there’s a script working on cleaning those up. As for the subject line issue, thanks for the heads up, I’m looking into it (starting with some testing in the subject line of this comment!)
Re: Re: Re:5
Aha, good thing I tested!
I saw the issues in the comment preview as well – but upon submitting, the characters worked! We’ll get the previews fixed up soon, but until then you can quote to your heart’s desire
Well obviously soemthing has gone horribly wrong… I still have an account.
😀
Re:
Well obviously soemthing has gone horribly wrong… I still have an account.
Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well, etc. etc… 😉
Re: Re:
Just me or are others having to move out of threaded to hit reply to posts?
Will it alao be easier to show articles with new unread comments? Like a new bit on the frontpage right-hand sidebar, perhaps?
Re:
That’s the kind of thing that it will be much easier for us to make now, yeah. I have a few ideas for newer sidebar items but unread comments is a good possibility – we need a bit of time before we’ll be ready to start working on new features, but we hope to do all kinds of cool stuff!
Re: Re:
I didn’t notice this a few hours ago, but now I’m seeing that reply chains scoot over to thw leftt as I scroll down. I guess this is what y’all meant by making deep reply threads no longer unreadable.
I won’t miss scrolling through those yard-long single-word-wide posts along the right side of the screen.
Looks good...but
So I have my settings to variable width and when the website is full width, I’m scrolling through the comments and this little black box pops on the side of the screen and just gets in the way. Any chance it could be moved to the life side of the screen?
Re:
whoops yeah that should be better positioned when on variable width – we’ll get that fixed soon!
Hate the black box thingy…
Also I got the stupid cookie popup, but the url wasn’t clicky.
Re:
I can’t seem to get rid of that “reset your password” box.
Re:
The box shows you where in the overall comments you are (and also where comments you haven’t read are…). It’s definitely different but since we’ve been testing it out I find it really neat and useful.
Re: Re:
It makes me sad because it covers up parts of posts when you have the site set to wide.
Re: Re: Re:
Yeah, that’s being fixed (Leigh mentioned above…)
Re: Re:
It’s nice that comments no longer become “read” just from the page being loaded. Makes it easier to catch up on everything in long active threads on breaks without having to keep the tab open on my phone.
The rating and flagging buttons do nothing.
Re:
… and likewise, the Preview button.
Re: Re:
Preview works for me. It doesn’t go to a new page anymore. Now it just scrolls up and shows a preview in the messages area.
Re:
They allow me to click and unclick them and the icons turn gray when clicked, but there is a short delay for them to change.
So far, so ...
It looks really good so far. Looking forward to all the little quirks usually involved in migrating to a new platform. (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞
Cause and correlation.
“…it can now handle deeply-nested threads without becoming unreadable…”
…meaning tp won’t be able to troll threads asunder by iterating comments 300 tiers deep. He must be awfully pleased (😂) at this sign of successful feedback.
It’s new! It’s different! (the comments section, that is) but nothing about it bothers me… weird.
black box on left
really frigging annoying. seriously if you need that to tell you where you are in the comments, you are an imbecile. Please remove this anti-feature at once.
Re:
Actually that black box isn’t that annoying once you get used to it. To whit I can see the utility in any thread featuring tp and/or Baghdad Bob trying to spam the thread asunder.
Although given that thread texts are skewed to the left I’d probably put the navigation pane to the right where there is a lot more empty space.
anti-feature
the black box is an anti-feature. can you please remove this crap thanks.
Re: Black box
I see the value in the comment position black box, but I think it’s way larger than necessary. If it were half the width it would be just as useful and much less distracting.
Re: Re:
The black box is kind of annoying. It would be nice if there were a way to hide it, if we don’t want it.
Re: Re:
If you use Ublock, you can right click on the annoying black box and use “block element”. No more box.
Re: Re: Re:
Yes, but making it smaller would be harder (and would have to do it every time).
Also – it seems the subject is cleared when replying, is that on purpose?
Re: Re: Re:2
And I’m getting notifications of my own comments, which wasn’t happening on the old site.
Random question marks in article
I haven’t seen anybody else comment about it, so I’m adding to the pile. This article (haven’t checked others yet) is delivered with seemingly random question marks in the middle of sentences. These are both in the formatted article and in the page source as plaintext question marks with a space on either side.
Re:
Yup there are a few character issues still being resolved – those question marks should start disappearing soon!
Elon!
If anything does go wrong, I’m sure Karl Bode will find a way to blame Elon Musk. 😉
So far, so good
Had to reset my password, but I had no issues doing so. I’m kinda liking the new layout, even more so because the comment chains don’t become unreadable after a certain point.
Dunno if it’s because the spamfilter is much harder to get by now, but when I make a comment with a link in it, the comment doesn’t immediately show up. Did y’all tighten the spamfilter or is it a screw-up on my end somehow?
Re:
Your comment with the pastebin link was caught in spam yeah (cleared now) – not sure if that was a freak accident or what, we’ll be monitoring the issue of false positives and figure out how to tweak going forward.
My opinion: There’s too much empty space in the comments. Everything is spaced much further apart vertically such that I only see one comment at a time on the page. Admittedly I probably use a smaller screen size than most users today, but the comments look like someone grabbed the top and bottom of the page and stretched it vertically.
Maybe it’s because I’m using older browsers on an older system, but the old site always looked neatly arranged. This one kind of looks like the layout isn’t being handled correctly. See here;
https://freeimage.host/i/EJlj2e
Re:
Woah! What browser/system are you on? You are getting major display issues there – that is nothing like how it’s supposed to look.
Re: Re:
My view looks the same as rekrul’s
Currently using Firefox on my tablet, which seems to commonly use an in-between of not quite mobile, not quite desktop display.
Re: Re: Re:
Very strange – even in mobile it shouldn’t look anything like that, so not sure why that’s happening. We’ll figure it out as soon as we can!
Re: Re:
Sorry for the multiple posts, I was using the browser I used to use for reading Techdirt and it wasn’t showing me my posts, now I’m using a different browser.
I have an old system. This limits me to running old versions of browsers. I know it’s outdated, but at this time, it’s all I have.
Presented for the general mockery it will receive, I normally use Pale Moon 26.5. Not counting third party builds which generally don’t work much better, this is the absolute last version I am capable of running.
I also have Opera 36.0, which sometimes works better than Pale Moon, and sometimes fails miserably at even accessing some sites.
I know I’m way behind the times, but right now, getting a new system isn’t practical for me.
Anyway, that’s what it looks like for me, and the preview doesn’t work at all. At least I can post, which is more than I can do on most WordPress sites.
Re: Re: Re:
Tried running a live-cd with some flavor of Linux just to see if it works on your system? There are a bunch of them that are specifically built to run on older hardware, that way you should be able to use a modern browser.
Re: Re: Re:2
That would probably work, but I don’t know anything about using Linux and I hop back and forth between reading sites like this and doing other stuff all the time, so it would be really inconvenient to boot one OS just for web browsing and another for everything else.
Re: Re: Re:3 Trying Linux
If you can boot from a flash drive, you could try the large version of Knoppix, and see if there are free software programs that meet you needs. Knoppix comes with a large sample of various free and open source program, covering office, photo and video editor, and cad. It also includes wine, so you can see if you can get some of your windows programs to run using it.
A dual cor pentium at 1.8Ghz, with 3GB of memory will run a modern linux distribution for anything other tha memory hungry application, such as serious video editing.
Re: Re:
I typed a reply, but I don’t see it on the page, yet I see the post I made AFTER that reply.
Re: Re: Re:
One of your replies was caught in an overactive spam filter (now cleared). And I see one more reply from you, and several other comments – not sure if there are others missing? We will continue looking into it.
Re: Re: Re:2
I think that’s all the ones I posted.
Some additional info:
In my version of Pale Moon, the icons for rating a post as funny, flagging for abuse, etc, don’t show up. The links are there when I mouse over them, but not the actual images. I only see the ones for first word and last word. They all show up in Opera. The only ones that work though, in either browser, are the first/last words, which tell me that I must be logged in. None of the others do anything when I click them.
Also, besides the Preview option not working, the links for collapsing replies and viewing in chronology don’t do anything. Neither does the little icon above some posters’ names that looks like a stack of quote bubbles with a number in brackets.
Finally, I notice that all the posts I’ve made have a different graphical icon next to them. I thought that multiple posts from the same person/IP address were supposed to be tagged with the same icon so that people could tell they were from the same person and not just using the same name?
On the positive side, I just replied to someone else and it showed up right away when the page reloaded.
The preview doesn’t work and even though the page appeared to do something when I clicked the post button, I don’t see my comment.
This is a test to see if I can post comments.
Also, when I post, my comments don’t show up right away. I’ve just reloaded the page several times and don’t see the reply I just made.
Apparently I can’t reply to people because whenever I used the Reply option, my comments never show up on the page.
Even with stand-alone comments, they don’t usually appear when it reloads the page and I have to reload it a few times, switch browsers, etc, to get them to show up.
It seems my being able to post is a crapshoot, some comments post and others never show up.
Weird auth flow
Normally when I choose to auth on techdirt I use https://www.techdirt.com/my-account/ which looks like any other Techdirt page, but if I try to reply to a posting when I am not authenticated, when I click the login link I get forwarded to a wordpress branded login page (with some ungodly URL), which encourages me to link my Techdirt and WordPress accounts, is this intended, and what advantage is there to linking accounts?
Notification emails
I’ve also gotten several emails about new comments that don’t have any new comments in them.