Leigh Beadon 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (6138)

• On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 03 Apr, 2022 @ 03:52pm

  Indeed. At some point that sentence was going to be "the one that won first place" and I guess the wrong word survived :) fixing!

• On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 27 Mar, 2022 @ 12:41pm

  whoops - fixed!

• On the post: Techdirt Podcast Episode 315: The Right To Repair

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 16 Mar, 2022 @ 11:59am

  Unfortunately it was issues with the recording itself - not sure if it was the mic or the connection, but that audio is all we got. The only other real option was scrapping it entirely, and I figured the conversation was still worth putting out.

• On the post: Some Known Issues With The New Techdirt

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 07 Mar, 2022 @ 03:21pm

  Sometimes, the ability to theoretically handle anything makes it labor-intensive to handle each specific thing :) There definitely is some stuff that seems like it should be easier - but so far, it's capable of doing everything, with effort. And of course, the data migration needs were a big part of the challenge: it wasn't just a matter of building these features, but building them in a way that allowed us to map everything from the old Techdirt onto the new one, with minimal disruption in the continuity of everything functioning, and the goal of a quick migration with up-to-the-minute data that wouldn't require a lengthy shutdown of the site. If we were building from the ground up for a new site, some things would have been easier - but we were also building for compatibility with the data (and just our user habits) from over 20 years of development on a entirely custom CMS with lots of idiosyncrasies and patchwork workarounds.

• On the post: Some Known Issues With The New Techdirt

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 07 Mar, 2022 @ 09:08am

  We'll definitely give consideration to A through D as we make changes. One thing I can answer now, which is E: it's named the Comment Scrubber after the tools used in audio/video software that show you a condensed waveform/thumbnail timeline and let you quickly shift to that point in the file by clicking. Those are called "scrubbers"! But - it is perhaps true that this terminology isn't clear to a lot of people.

• On the post: Some Known Issues With The New Techdirt

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 07 Mar, 2022 @ 08:39am

  WordPress customer service is definitely not lacking! You would not believe how much work they have done for us for two straight years to make this possible. I know Techdirt might seem "relatively simple" but the truth is, as blogs go, it's really not. We had added a lot of custom features over the years. Our comment voting/badges system is unlike any out-of-the-box solutions, the membership system is entirely custom tracking multiple different subscription tiers via integration with both Foxycart (for our direct purchase store) and Patreon, lots of our little features our non-standard on blogs these days (user preferences for site display, markdown in comments, the post expander) and some break common rules of modern CMS systems (infinitely-deep comment reply threads). And that's not even getting into some of our non-standard back-end features that we've developed for our editorial flow over the years. It required a lot of custom work to rebuild it all as a WordPress theme, and then there's the other huge issue: the data migration. Our entire data structure was non-standard, and not easily mapped to WordPress - it required development of a custom, multi-stage process to move over 75,000 posts and a couple million comments and reformat/retabulate everything in a new structure. The bugs we're seeing now are what remains after making so, so many difficult things work properly. And they certainly do have solutions for everything we're seeing, but some require special work due to all the aforementioned customization. All we can do now is continue to work steadily through them as best we can!

• On the post: Some Known Issues With The New Techdirt

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 06 Mar, 2022 @ 09:29pm

  Personally, I would not describe it as a disaster

• On the post: Half Of the Major Internet-Connected Security Systems Are Vulnerable To Jamming

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 01 Mar, 2022 @ 06:54am

  Hi Ehud - we are working as hard as we can to resolve all the issues. This site migration was a necessary thing for us, and some bugs were inevitable - and we have a very small team but we're doing what we can to make it as smooth as possible. We'll get your Crystal Ball restored ASAP - I'm sorry to hear that this brief disruption impacts your goodwill towards the site.

• On the post: Important Announcement: Techdirt Is Migrating To A New Platform

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2022 @ 12:51pm

  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.

• On the post: Important Announcement: Techdirt Is Migrating To A New Platform

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2022 @ 12:29pm

  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!

• On the post: Important Announcement: Techdirt Is Migrating To A New Platform

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2022 @ 12:17pm

  Woah! What browser/system are you on? You are getting major display issues there - that is nothing like how it's supposed to look.

• On the post: Important Announcement: Techdirt Is Migrating To A New Platform

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2022 @ 12:07pm

  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.

• On the post: Welcome To The New Techdirt!

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2022 @ 12:00pm

  Yeah - that system hasn't been in real use for a very long time, and we were having some issues with it in the transition, so we decided to deprecate for the time being. I know that sucks for some of our long-time users who had some old submitted stories in there, and I'm sorry about that! At some point we will try to bring it back if we can.

• On the post: Welcome To The New Techdirt!

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2022 @ 11:51am

  The issue may have to do with the fact that your memberships were bought with a different email address than your Techdirt account email, then activated on your Techdirt account. The system should be handling that, but it seems not to be in this case. If you still have access to the email that you bought the subscription with, you can check there - I think you will have gotten a new Activation email, allowing you to reactivate the subscription on your TD account. Feel free to do that, if you did! But this should have happened automatically so we're working on getting it fixed, too.

• On the post: Welcome To The New Techdirt!

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2022 @ 11:21am

  Variable width works, there's no hard limit! BUT the issue is with user preferences not being saved for non-logged-in users. Very sorry about that - as soon as we get that fixed it will work just like it used to.

• On the post: Welcome To The New Techdirt!

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2022 @ 11:16am

  Update: your membership is still in the system, just something went wrong with it properly associating with your account! We will get this fixed asap

• On the post: Welcome To The New Techdirt!

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2022 @ 11:10am

  Looking into this for you

• On the post: Important Announcement: Techdirt Is Migrating To A New Platform

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2022 @ 10:30am

  Yup there are a few character issues still being resolved - those question marks should start disappearing soon!

• On the post: Welcome To The New Techdirt!

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2022 @ 10:29am

  The Comment Scrubber

  We'll be rolling out a fix to prevent the comment scrubber from covering up content on variable width display soon! And following that, a user preference to disable it entirely. I do urge people to wait and give it a try next time we have a huge comment thread though - I find it very useful for navigation when that's the case.

• On the post: Welcome To The New Techdirt!

  

  Leigh Beadon ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2022 @ 10:27am

  The icons also visibly change, but it's probably not distinct enough. Definitely will make some tweaks to this interface experience soon!

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