Welcome To MGoBlog 3.0 Comment Count

Brian

HELLO! New digs over here, but why do you care? This thing now runs on Drupal, a content management system that's designed to facilitate multi-user sites. It has many, many features, like:

Comment improvements. No more 300-comment threads full of drive-bys, first posters, and several people talking back and forth at each other without any guidance as to just what the hell is going on.

The new comments:

  • Can be restricted to registered users. I'm going to leave it open for a while to see how it goes, but if things get too annoying I'll lock out unregistered comments.
  • Prohibit handle-jacking. All unregistered commenters post as 'Anonymous Coward.'
  • Are more fuctional. A WYSIWIG editor allows you to bold, italicize, link, bullet, and indent without having to know any HTML.
  • Are local. This should allow them to be searched for in the future, and you can always find a user's entire comment ouevre on his user page.
  • Can be threaded or collapsed as you please.

Diaries. There is a species of Michigan blog akin to the mayfly. Inspired by this, that, or the other, a reader gets the idea he'll add his voice to the Michigan blogosphere, puts up a couple good posts, and then disappears once the overwhelming feeling of talking to himself is just too much.

These are invariably sad occurrences. Other times people just email me cool stuff, or leave excellent comments that really deserve a wider audience. When I miss these, they die on the vine.

Now registered users can maintain their own section of the site, where they can post whatever they want. SBNation calls these "FanPosts" and they're usually sparse and a little sad; DailyKos calls them "diaries" and there are frickin' millions of them. In any case, the idea is the same: post what you want. The tabbed section at the top of the right sidebar will track and link to various posts that are either new, popular, or "hot" -- commented on lots. If something is really good I might bump it to the front page, and if there's enough quality in that section there will be a regular (weekly? biweekly?) roundup.

Better organization. The old site's sidebar creaked ominously under the extreme pressure of thousands upon thousands of sidebar sections, links, and other cruft. Here, the really important site-usability stuff has migrated up into the navigation bar you see right below the banner, and the piles of links have migrated into flyout menus so that they don't take up too much screenspace when you're not looking for a Purdue blog.

A message board. Drupal comes with out-of-the-box message board software. It kind of sucks, but it works. I plan on doing something about it later, but for now there is a board, and it won't have any porn spam. Probably. It will remain a single board until such time as excessive off topic traffic drives people nuts, at which point there will be a schism.

The message board should be the place all OT talk goes. At some point the comments section exploded into an unmanageable mess and I stopped reading it because there were 500-800 comments every day, many of them about Gary Sheffield. I want to read the comments as long as they're relevant, and they will be relevant henceforth: offtopic posts are strongly discouraged and are subject to capricious deletion.

 

The future!

 

But that's not all, folks. Drupal is like a camel: if you beat it enough, it will take you anywhere. When I can find time (read: in January at the earliest), I plan on undertaking various other projects:

A recruiting wiki. Scouring the earth for every piece of information available on the dozens of kids Michigan recruits every year is a task that one man will necessarily leave incomplete. You can see evidence for yourself whenever Varsity Blue updates its recruiting board with 50% stuff I've never seen.

User-submitted photo galleries. Like diaries.

A Bittorrent tracker. Maybe. MGoVideo is up and has a good community around it, but I can't help but think it could be significantly larger and more comprehensive if it was part of this site.

Subscriptions. MGoBlog is and will always be totally free, but some people have expressed such enormous irritation with the banner ads -- though I do try to keep them under control -- that they'd prefer to buy their way out of them. I would love to provide this capability, and once certain add-ons provide versions for Drupal 6, I'll try to get it going.

User points. A big part of organizing a lot of information is providing ways for users to self-moderate the site; I hope to provide incentives for that.

Anything you can think of. I am open to suggestions.

One final item.

I've just hurled together an enormous amount of stuff labeled "beta" or even "alpha" and tested it... somewhat. There will no doubt be bugs. If there are, please email me and I'll get on it. Email me about bugs. Email about bugs. 

Send email if there are bugs. Dey tik er jeeeh.

Comments

Joe

June 30th, 2008 at 9:53 AM ^

This is like a dream come true. Not only do we have a registered comment thread (DC Joe dropped the DC in light of an anticipated move), but now I have a new toy to waste the workday away with...

Anonymous Coward (not verified)

June 30th, 2008 at 9:53 AM ^

Can you get some hot models for the MgoStore? That girl with the dude haircut kills me.

k bizzle

June 30th, 2008 at 9:57 AM ^

I've been visiting this site for over a year and a half now and am a huge fan. Decided to sign up with all the new changes being made. Can't wait to actually talk about Michigan football and not have to deal with WVU & OSU fans posting all day on other sites.

doxa

June 30th, 2008 at 9:59 AM ^

Brian I love you but… The design (skin) for this site has to go. You bring the best college football content day in and day out, but this site looks like my sisters myspace page! Brian-this doesn’t add up! Go out and hire someone to make this site look like the quality of your content. Again, Brian we are nothing with out you…but please give my eyes a break and re-design this site. (Might I suggest finding a new skin…the internet is full of them) I humbly bow as I present my request…

Jebus

June 30th, 2008 at 10:02 AM ^

*tents fingers* And it's not even my birthday! Although, is anyone else having a problem with the main view- the text being down below a large whitespace area?

oriental andrew

June 30th, 2008 at 10:22 AM ^

I have the same issue with the posts being pushed all the way down below the right sidebar.  If only that sidebar were a little narrower.  Of course, I'm also stuck using IE6 on my ancient work laptop (Dell Latitude D600) that I can't seem to get IT to replace for me. 

 Also, the comments also have a white space formatting issue.  Again, may be an IE6 issue. 

And finally, yeah, yahoo routed the registration email to spam for me as well.  Whew!

Emails sent to our fearless leader.

qbwaggle

June 30th, 2008 at 10:18 AM ^

...is that the haloscan comments were easy to read in the open at work (very inconspicuous). Now it looks like I am reading message boards all day at work. Dammit.

Musket Rebellion

June 30th, 2008 at 10:34 AM ^

So, is troll going to be able to post anymore? I actually liked that guy. Somebody from Mgoblog just friended me on facebook. That was a bit mind-altering. I like the new sight, I'll be going over it for the next few days to make sure I am not missing anything.

Musket Rebellion

June 30th, 2008 at 10:46 AM ^

On a side note. How jacked are you to see me this weekend BRAH!?!?!? I got my new Jeep Wrangler and am driving it without the canvas on all the way down. I'm gonna be so jacked and tan when I get down there.

wile_e8

June 30th, 2008 at 10:46 AM ^

Is there any way to get a new comments link? That was one kind of nice thing about haloscan. I only see the "X new comments" link if I go back to the main page. Or is it there and I'm just not seeing it?

Anonymous Coward (not verified)

June 30th, 2008 at 10:59 AM ^

Speaking of content, is there going to be any info on the S&C clinic that was held Saturday? Also MSC reports "Ex-Michigan football player James McKinney, who transferred to Louisville last season, is off his new team after being declared academically ineligible. Speaking of being academically ineligible, rumor has it that Michigan may have lost a defensive tackle for that exact reason." We lost a DT?

pz

June 30th, 2008 at 11:00 AM ^

Two items: 1) I always liked being able to easily see the # of users online - can we get that somewhere? 2) Can you set it up so that there doesn't have to be a subject (or the subject doesn't just automatically show the first few words of the post if left blank)?

M Go Blue

June 30th, 2008 at 11:02 AM ^

Almost forgot.... I heard Doug Karsch on Wolverine Sports Weekly (Fall Review Show) say that the players on Mich. told him that the Florida players were talking smack through the doors that separate the locker rooms. Anyone surprised?

Anonymous Coward (not verified)

June 30th, 2008 at 11:03 AM ^

So, When you repond to a post, it places the response directly below the post. But that seems wierd and it makes the board harder to read. Obviously, all other posts (non-response posts) go from most to least recent. I'm not sure if there is anything you can do about this, Brian? I think what works most effectively is a simple quote button where responses are placed below the quotes. Phbb messageboards do this, as does sites like the Freep.

big gay heart

June 30th, 2008 at 11:06 AM ^

So, I'm writing posts and they aren't showing up. Anyway, the "reply" function is hard to use. If fucks the chronology of the thread up soemthing fierce. Any way to just scrap it? Or, do what phbb boards and other boards (like the ones employed at www.freep.com), and utilize a "quote" function? Hopefully this post appears.

Sgt. Wolverine

June 30th, 2008 at 11:19 AM ^

I like the rest of the setup, but I'm not so sure about the comments; they're a bit cumbersome to read through because even short comments take up a big chunk of space. That was one good thing about Haloscan: everything was very compact.

Anonymous Coward (not verified)

June 30th, 2008 at 11:24 AM ^

Hey this is JHS, I haven't registered yet, but man does this new site suck. Scrolling up and down was much easier than going from page to page scrolling up to read all the comments. And trust me, you people will miss the handlejackers.