As you can tell, I'm still in the midsts of upgrading to the latest and greatest version of Orbitcast. It's functional right now, but no where near complete. This will be an evolutionary process, and your input is a key part in shaping that evolution.
First off, the biggest change you will notice is that there are no more "Anonymous Coward" comments. In the long-running Orbitcast poll, over 91% of respondents said they would like to see Anonymous comments disappear. And it's a pretty understandable response, because it was a minority of people (I see everyone's IP address) causing a majority of the problem.
That said, I don't want to completely remove the anonymity aspect of the site. After all, many of the people who read this site are "insiders" - be it from an employee standpoint, or just industry insiders - and that anonymity is key to garnering participation from these folks. But there needs to be a filter to prevent mayhem from ensuing. So you can still comment anonymously, but each comment will need to be approved. If you want to have your comment published immediately, then you need to register.
Speaking of registering, you can now use Open ID to sign-up. OpenID is increasingly gaining adoption among major sites like AOL, MySpace, and Yahoo! acting as providers. So you can carry your identification with you to Orbitcast.
More soon...
First off, the biggest change you will notice is that there are no more "Anonymous Coward" comments. In the long-running Orbitcast poll, over 91% of respondents said they would like to see Anonymous comments disappear. And it's a pretty understandable response, because it was a minority of people (I see everyone's IP address) causing a majority of the problem.
That said, I don't want to completely remove the anonymity aspect of the site. After all, many of the people who read this site are "insiders" - be it from an employee standpoint, or just industry insiders - and that anonymity is key to garnering participation from these folks. But there needs to be a filter to prevent mayhem from ensuing. So you can still comment anonymously, but each comment will need to be approved. If you want to have your comment published immediately, then you need to register.
Speaking of registering, you can now use Open ID to sign-up. OpenID is increasingly gaining adoption among major sites like AOL, MySpace, and Yahoo! acting as providers. So you can carry your identification with you to Orbitcast.
More soon...
That sounds good to me Ryan. I'll have to research the OpenID so I can register.
Also, I like the new design.
It's too bad MovableType doesn't have something akin to Slashdot, where you have threads that are modded up or down by the community and meta-moderation so you can make sure the moderators aren't biased. I think that would help signal to noise ratio--but Slashdot is somewhat antiquated and the Slash project is probably a lot harder to install and maintain.
Good job Ryan.
I'd like to sign in, and made an account on movable, but when I try to log, it says "invalid id".
maybe if you can put a Sirius Internet radio access on your site promoting what this site is all about !!
Sorry, it actually says "invalid login".
I've done password recovery to check, but after a half hour, I still haven't gotten my new password.
Is movable type buggy?
wow fuck yahoo openids.
I like it, now explain these new channel changes to 24 and 161 on XM. Is Clear Channel starting to set themselves up for the post-merger world?
http://xmradio.com/onxm/channelpage.xmc?ch=24
http://xmradio.com/onxm/channelpage.xmc?ch=161
Is there a chance to fix the font? On just a run of the mill business laptop set at default resolution (1024 X 768) the font is nearly unreadble.
The headlines render fine, as do the adds, but anything else is a horrible mess.
YAY! Typekey!
It's a bit broken though still, I can register but I can't login with OpenID and TypeKey.
This site is now not blind friendly. Wait.... Im not blind.
I can't get openid to work right, can I use typekey instead?
Ryan-
The site looks great, and I'm sure it will be even better than before! Keep up the good work.
Looks good.
How do you get one of those OpenId thingies? And tell me they aren't those horendoes url thingies attached to previous comments.
It's looking good, Ryan. I'm as glad as anyone that the anonymous posters will be gone; I just hope that you won't be replacing AC posts with people spoofing addresses using one-off OpenID providers.
Looking great, Ryan! Hopefully the AC changes will help stem the vitriol flowing from a few trolls in the comments.
looks good.. and openID... excellent.
Hmm, I'm not liking how the Open ID comments are looking. Those URLs are pretty ugly.
Note to others: I've added more layers of authentication, so if you have a TypeKey account (perhaps from the old-school Orbitcast days), or if you have a Vox or LiveJournal account - you can login with those identities as well. I'm checking out reports that native registration isn't working very well.
There's so much more good stuff to come.
And most importantly: I appreciate everyone being so understanding and patient - I know this isn't the smoothest of transitions. But I hope you'll agree that once it's over, it'll be worth it.
But really, how easy is it for the idiot ACers to open up a new OpenID account once you ban their old one - a few seconds max? We need IP address bans and software that can see through proxies. That should stop most of these hayseeds and at the very least will make them spend a bit of time trying to get around the bans to post their childing "0.0" type comments.
site looks great keep up the great work!
Regarding the font, I'm not sure why it would be displaying poorly - I actually made the font BIGGER because of complaints about the teeny-tiny font from before.
Please email me screenshots if you guys see anything wacky to ryans@orbitcast.com, I appreciate it!
I tried to make an account with movable type, but never got the authorization e-mail. My old TypeKey login from like 2 Orbitcast incarnations works fine. I don't much care for the OpenID thingy, although it does work, I made a comment in the Russo thread with it, and am unlikely to use it further now that I know TypeKey works.
Thanks again Ryan, nice job as always! I used Openid by way of Live Journal, so it was great to sign in so easily! No stupid "type the characters you see in the picture" bullshit.
Hurray! My typekey account still works.
For some reason, the moveable type account says my account has been suspended and must contact the administrator. Heck, I just signed up, why would it be suspended?
Anyway, great job on the new site Ryan.
Keep up the good work.
type key is back, yah. open id sent no email, 24 hours later
Hmmm, there's a mighty good handful of bugs I need to work out. Thanks everyone for your feedback, glad to see that a few of you have still gotten through. I'm plugging away when I can to get stuff fixed asap.
@Toonhead, Wes Derby, et all: I'm very happy that you guys haven't witnessed any accessibility issues! As you know, making sure the site is Section 508 compliant (or as close as possible) is very very important to me.
MORE TO COME!
Excellent upgrade. Now we don't see the AC bashing and HD noise!!!