12 August 2016

New look heralds big changes at RiotACT

| The RiotACT
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We’re looking better than ever this week (if we do say so ourselves), with a revamped website that has been designed to complement our all-new team and revitalised editorial direction, and to make it easier for you to access and share the content we create together.

The site is now optimised for mobile use, which means you’ll be able to read articles and have your say more easily on tablets and phones. Hallelujah!

The design is brighter, livelier and more colourful than its yellow and black predecessor, to reflect our team’s positive outlook on Canberra life.

Behind the scenes, it’s more up to date, which will give us scope to further improve existing features, and more easily introduce future offerings. There are one or two post-migration glitches to iron out, but we’re 95 per cent there.

We’re keen to hear what you think, and open to making changes based on your suggestions, so please let us know by leaving a comment below or dropping us a line via social media or the Contact us page.

So, about that all-new team. You probably already know that the founders of the RiotACT haven’t been involved for some time, having handed the reins to new owners in 2014. What you may not know, though, is that the site has just been acquired again, by a group of Canberra entrepreneurs with some serious runs on the board in both the ecommerce and digital media spaces.

We’re looking forward to introducing you to them in the next few days, so you can share in our excitement about what their involvement means for the RiotACT and its readers, and for Canberra and the surrounding region.

The new owners have already made changes to the executive staff.

Award-winning former Fairfax journalist and digital first book publisher Charlotte Harper, who joined as acting editor in late 2015, has this week agreed to stay on permanently as Editor of the RiotACT. She is looking forward to recruiting a band of new writers to join the RiotACT’s strong team of regular contributors in coming months, and to steering the RiotACT’s mix of serious and less-so coverage of the coming ACT election. We can’t say too much about the latter yet except to reveal that it may involve cupcakes.

Joining the team as Business Manager is the irrepressible Josh Mulrine, another new media entrepreneur. Josh is a long-term fan of the RiotACT with real expertise in digital media and particularly video. He is looking forward to giving decision-makers around town the inside running on what we’re up to and how they can get involved.

We’ll be telling you more about Charlotte, Josh and their plans in coming days, and asking for your feedback on all of this as the RiotACT begins the most exciting phase of its journey so far.

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TuggLife said :

I quite like the moderation – r/canberra on Reddit often links to RiotACT articles and is unmoderated, and the quality of the comments is rubbish, and often defamatory. I do agree that moderation could be a bit quicker, though – it would help to promote discussion if there was more frequent posting of comments.

+1. The frequency of moderation/posting has greatly increased of late. Previously, sometimes there were no new posts in a 24 hour period, despite there sometimes being 40+ contributions awaiting moderation. So thats a plus.

justin heywood6:01 pm 19 Aug 16

mapinact said :

…I had a different account…but cancelled it when one regular commenter was allowed to post anti-climate-change crap unchallenged by moderators.

Surely it’s not the moderators job to argue the science of climate change? It sounds to me like you would like a return to the old days when the moderator would join or even lead the abuse of people who went against the tide. That did’t encourage intelligent debate either.
As far as I can see, the moderators here are pretty neutral, which reflects the middle ground of the general population. There are plenty of other boards which lean to the left or the right, depending on your fancy.

mapinact said :

I have yet to find any site that doesn’t descend rapidly into an echo-chamber of racist, sexist, right-wing nastiness from a small but committed band of undereducated, underemployed rednecks.

There certainly wasn’t a shortage of left-wing name calling nastiness here either, if I recall.
But if it comes from the left is that OK?

mapinact said :

I’m well aware of the double standards in this comment.

Yes there is a double standard in your comment. It sounds like you’d like a board that largely replicates your own outlook.

But I see where you’re coming from. Like most, I’m a member of several other boards, some of which are moderated hard for interest, relevance and content. The heavily moderated boards are usually interesting, but slow moving and not anyone’s first choice when doing some middle of the day procrastinating.

I agree, unmoderated boards are a cesspool. Five minutes spent below most YouTube clips will destroy your faith in mankind.

This version of the RiotACT is relatively new. There are a lot of well educated, witty and intelligent people in Canberra, many of whom may have been reluctant to ‘join the fray’ back when the moderation was a bit more casual and abuse more likely. I hope that the moderation policy now in place will encourage more of them to post comments, and this may take more time than we’ve had so far.

Mordd - IndyMedia4:05 pm 19 Aug 16

Correction: my comments about the site traffic growing are not correct, they were based on me misinterpreting a global rankings stat as a traffic stat.

The traffic has actually declined slightly recently after growing slightly during the federal election period.

I won’t go into more detail here as I have submitted an opinion piece looking at wether unmoderated comments could work that discusses the site traffic stats in detail, so you can read it there when that hopefully gets approved in the next few days.

Mordd - IndyMedia2:16 pm 19 Aug 16

Having to pay to comment will reduce the conversations to an echo chamber of no more than the same 20-40 people at best, with no-one else ever commenting because they won’t pay to comment occasionally and don’t care enough to comment regularly.

Retaining moderation is one thing, but requiring paid accounts to comment will kill the site faster than anything else done here to date. How many of the current commentors you don’t like had $15 / month paid subs before anyway? Also, $10 for how long a period? Monthly? – Too expensive like before. Quarterly – reasonable, but would need to have no ads to go along with the sub then. Bi-annually – Even better I guess. Annually – a token amount at this point, but still enough to stop ppl signing up to post a comment once a month.

It depends how big you want the site to be I guess? After the last ownership change, there was a drop of about 150K daily readers over the subsequent 9 month period, and it has taken since then to slowly climb that number back to around what it used to be again now, with the site adding 75K daily readers in the last 6 months alone now.

Paid comments will result in a subsequent significant traffic drop again, which makes advertisers want to leave also, which makes it harder for the site to exist overall. Growth is the only way forward, and that means encouraging more comments, not less. I know you have the opposite view mapinact but I don’t see what you want as being financially viable overall, there won’t be enough paid commentors to make up for all that loss in ad impressions from the lost traffic.

Other sites automatically block a comment from showing after it receives X number of downvotes. One sure way to grow the site faster, is to go unmoderated for the comments, with the addition of up/down votes and hiding any comment that receives more than X downvotes, along with a priority reporting ability for outright spam/nasty stuff based around a trusted reader group internally that can notify admins right away to remove something if needed. Other sites do it this way and it works well, the time spent moderating every comment is instead spent by quickly reviewing any comment that gets reported by the trusted member group, and the downvote hiding takes care of the less egregious but still bad comments.

mapinact said :

With regard to moderation I’d like to put a few ideas forward.

As a background, I had a different account and username on RiotACT for nearly a decade but cancelled it a few years back when the site was first sold and one regular commenter was allowed to post anti-climate-change crap unchallenged by moderators. I didn’t want to be associated with a site that allowed that and similar crap through as if it was intelligent public discussion. I still don’t, and depending on whether this gets through moderation and what happens with the site or not I may well cancel this account too.

I think allowing an unmoderated forum would be an absolute disaster. I have yet to find any site that doesn’t descend rapidly into an echo-chamber of racist, sexist, right-wing nastiness from a small but committed band of undereducated, underemployed rednecks. Think youtube comments, 4chan, parts of reddit, the comments on any political article in the SMH online. I note that NPR in the US has just decided to ditch comments on articles entirely – an approach I applaud.

For the RiotACT this can’t work, unfortunately – the whole point is to be a conversation. But read back through the comments on pretty much any article and you ‘ll find the same tired derogation and vituperation pads out a few gem comments worth reading. It is, for the most part, crap, and humourless at that. Metafilter this place ain’t.

So here’s my plan:

– Paid accounts to comment. Not much – say $10. Enough so it hurts to lose it if you deliberately fling shit around.

– A 3 strikes rule for disallowed comments submitted (racist, sexist, gratuitously insulting, comments that fly in the face of logic or common sense UNLESS they contain some sort of logical justification). After 3 strikes your account’s cancelled and you lose your $10.

– Moderate, and moderate HARD. For every article allow (say) only 20 comments, and the comments are at the moderator’s discretion, like a Letter to the Editor. To get a comment published, it must therefore be worth reading, and add value to the conversation or it just won’t be published at all. And if by chance more than 20 worthwhile comments are received, moderators could start a new thread.

– Comments must reply to the OP, not other commenters unless they add something useful to the thread.

– Comments cannot contain cliches like “rusted-on”, “lefties”, “luvvies”, or “witty” name tranformations like Tony Rabbit or Malcolm Turncoat – if you want to make an argument, use your own words. If nothing else it’ll reveal just how deeply (or shallowly) you think.

– Moderation happens when it happens – there won’t be any instantaneous satisfaction of seeing a comment go straight up. This is good – it might make people think before posting. If you want instantaneous low-content, low-value brain-farts instead of a conversation go to Twitter, that’s what it’s for.

Moderation brings its own bias I’m aware. So be it – this is a privately owned site, and the owners are free to promote whatever view(s) they like – there’s no obligation to allow any or all points of view. I’d hope it’s a bit more open and free-ranging than the ugly and depressingly grey conservatism of some commenters and articles, but we shall see.

As for the $10, if you really can’t afford it, appeal directly and privately to the moderators – they could create an account gratis if they think you’ll be a worthwhile addition to site.

I’m well aware of the double standards in this comment – I say bring on paid commenting and I’m using a free account. I’m saying be less gratuitously insulting and I’m swearing [we took your swearing out – Ed]. I’m saying most comments are crap, and you may not like this one. Don’t care – I’m playing by the rules in force here and now. But I’d be fascinated to know what you think of the ideas.

And to the regulars that will threaten to take their bat and ball and go home if ideas like these are put into place – to be honest I think it’d be a vast improvement to the quality of debate here if you did.

An intelligent and well written article that challenges the moderation bias, the most prolific posters and the operating procedures of this site. Very nice work and I’m stunned that it was allowed to see the light of day.

I assume that now we will see a torrent of the very posts you were talking about in the mistaken belief that it is rebuttal.
Thanks for letting me know that one could cancel membership of the site. I shall investigate further

Charlotte Harper1:43 pm 19 Aug 16

mapinact said :

With regard to moderation I’d like to put a few ideas forward.

As a background, I had a different account and username on RiotACT for nearly a decade but cancelled it a few years back when the site was first sold and one regular commenter was allowed to post anti-climate-change crap unchallenged by moderators. I didn’t want to be associated with a site that allowed that and similar crap through as if it was intelligent public discussion. I still don’t, and depending on whether this gets through moderation and what happens with the site or not I may well cancel this account too.

I think allowing an unmoderated forum would be an absolute disaster. I have yet to find any site that doesn’t descend rapidly into an echo-chamber of racist, sexist, right-wing nastiness from a small but committed band of undereducated, underemployed rednecks. Think youtube comments, 4chan, parts of reddit, the comments on any political article in the SMH online. I note that NPR in the US has just decided to ditch comments on articles entirely – an approach I applaud.

For the RiotACT this can’t work, unfortunately – the whole point is to be a conversation. But read back through the comments on pretty much any article and you ‘ll find the same tired derogation and vituperation pads out a few gem comments worth reading. It is, for the most part, crap, and humourless at that. Metafilter this place ain’t.

So here’s my plan:

– Paid accounts to comment. Not much – say $10. Enough so it hurts to lose it if you deliberately fling shit around.

– A 3 strikes rule for disallowed comments submitted (racist, sexist, gratuitously insulting, comments that fly in the face of logic or common sense UNLESS they contain some sort of logical justification). After 3 strikes your account’s cancelled and you lose your $10.

– Moderate, and moderate HARD. For every article allow (say) only 20 comments, and the comments are at the moderator’s discretion, like a Letter to the Editor. To get a comment published, it must therefore be worth reading, and add value to the conversation or it just won’t be published at all. And if by chance more than 20 worthwhile comments are received, moderators could start a new thread.

– Comments must reply to the OP, not other commenters unless they add something useful to the thread.

– Comments cannot contain cliches like “rusted-on”, “lefties”, “luvvies”, or “witty” name tranformations like Tony Rabbit or Malcolm Turncoat – if you want to make an argument, use your own words. If nothing else it’ll reveal just how deeply (or shallowly) you think.

– Moderation happens when it happens – there won’t be any instantaneous satisfaction of seeing a comment go straight up. This is good – it might make people think before posting. If you want instantaneous low-content, low-value brain-farts instead of a conversation go to Twitter, that’s what it’s for.

Moderation brings its own bias I’m aware. So be it – this is a privately owned site, and the owners are free to promote whatever view(s) they like – there’s no obligation to allow any or all points of view. I’d hope it’s a bit more open and free-ranging than the ugly and depressingly grey conservatism of some commenters and articles, but we shall see.

As for the $10, if you really can’t afford it, appeal directly and privately to the moderators – they could create an account gratis if they think you’ll be a worthwhile addition to site.

I’m well aware of the double standards in this comment – I say bring on paid commenting and I’m using a free account. I’m saying be less gratuitously insulting and I’m swearing [we took your swearing out – Ed]. I’m saying most comments are crap, and you may not like this one. Don’t care – I’m playing by the rules in force here and now. But I’d be fascinated to know what you think of the ideas.

And to the regulars that will threaten to take their bat and ball and go home if ideas like these are put into place – to be honest I think it’d be a vast improvement to the quality of debate here if you did.

Thanks for taking the time to consider all of this, @mapinact, and for sharing your ideas. We’re working on draft updated moderating guidelines to tie in with the relaunch and some back end updates to the site that are in the works. We’ll discuss your suggestions, and will consult widely again when the new draft guidelines are ready.

With regard to moderation I’d like to put a few ideas forward.

As a background, I had a different account and username on RiotACT for nearly a decade but cancelled it a few years back when the site was first sold and one regular commenter was allowed to post anti-climate-change crap unchallenged by moderators. I didn’t want to be associated with a site that allowed that and similar crap through as if it was intelligent public discussion. I still don’t, and depending on whether this gets through moderation and what happens with the site or not I may well cancel this account too.

I think allowing an unmoderated forum would be an absolute disaster. I have yet to find any site that doesn’t descend rapidly into an echo-chamber of racist, sexist, right-wing nastiness from a small but committed band of undereducated, underemployed rednecks. Think youtube comments, 4chan, parts of reddit, the comments on any political article in the SMH online. I note that NPR in the US has just decided to ditch comments on articles entirely – an approach I applaud.

For the RiotACT this can’t work, unfortunately – the whole point is to be a conversation. But read back through the comments on pretty much any article and you ‘ll find the same tired derogation and vituperation pads out a few gem comments worth reading. It is, for the most part, crap, and humourless at that. Metafilter this place ain’t.

So here’s my plan:

– Paid accounts to comment. Not much – say $10. Enough so it hurts to lose it if you deliberately fling shit around.

– A 3 strikes rule for disallowed comments submitted (racist, sexist, gratuitously insulting, comments that fly in the face of logic or common sense UNLESS they contain some sort of logical justification). After 3 strikes your account’s cancelled and you lose your $10.

– Moderate, and moderate HARD. For every article allow (say) only 20 comments, and the comments are at the moderator’s discretion, like a Letter to the Editor. To get a comment published, it must therefore be worth reading, and add value to the conversation or it just won’t be published at all. And if by chance more than 20 worthwhile comments are received, moderators could start a new thread.

– Comments must reply to the OP, not other commenters unless they add something useful to the thread.

– Comments cannot contain cliches like “rusted-on”, “lefties”, “luvvies”, or “witty” name tranformations like Tony Rabbit or Malcolm Turncoat – if you want to make an argument, use your own words. If nothing else it’ll reveal just how deeply (or shallowly) you think.

– Moderation happens when it happens – there won’t be any instantaneous satisfaction of seeing a comment go straight up. This is good – it might make people think before posting. If you want instantaneous low-content, low-value brain-farts instead of a conversation go to Twitter, that’s what it’s for.

Moderation brings its own bias I’m aware. So be it – this is a privately owned site, and the owners are free to promote whatever view(s) they like – there’s no obligation to allow any or all points of view. I’d hope it’s a bit more open and free-ranging than the ugly and depressingly grey conservatism of some commenters and articles, but we shall see.

As for the $10, if you really can’t afford it, appeal directly and privately to the moderators – they could create an account gratis if they think you’ll be a worthwhile addition to site.

I’m well aware of the double standards in this comment – I say bring on paid commenting and I’m using a free account. I’m saying be less gratuitously insulting and I’m swearing [we took your swearing out – Ed]. I’m saying most comments are crap, and you may not like this one. Don’t care – I’m playing by the rules in force here and now. But I’d be fascinated to know what you think of the ideas.

And to the regulars that will threaten to take their bat and ball and go home if ideas like these are put into place – to be honest I think it’d be a vast improvement to the quality of debate here if you did.

Citizen Phil11:47 am 18 Aug 16

The left hand ads staying fixed are annoying if they’re rotating, distracting when you’re trying to read. If you’re going to fix a column the right hand one is much more useful. If not, I hope you’re charging your advertisers more for the privilege.

Charlotte Harper7:52 am 18 Aug 16

No_Nose said :

Mordd – IndyMedia said :

FYI if the new Show More button the Trending Comments is not working for you, you will have to disable AdBlock (plus) for this site or put up with it not working, I tested and all popular ad blockers are currently blocking this tab by accident.

Why are some ‘trending’ threads being shown with 3 or 4 comments and others with just 1?

If they all just had the title and just the last comment (one) there would be space to list more threads as trending.

As I said previously, comments seem to get moderated/released in blocks usually it is about 5-6 sites trending at the same time…then nothing for hours and hours (sometimes up to 48 hours).

Thanks for your feedback, @No_Nose (and everyone who has contributed over the past week or so).

On average comments are moderated at least hourly during business hours – most of the time every 30 minutes or so. Comments that require a second review can take longer to moderate. Please check our moderation guidelines if you want to give your comment the best chance of getting through without any issues.

We are in the process of updating the moderation guidelines and will be calling for community consultation during that process too.

The trending now section shows the last placed comments (up to 5 per article). Moderators will at times choose to mark a comment to appear at the article level only, because the comment is referring to an older article, for example.

Based on the latest feedback we are going to move to showing the last 15 comments. Then if you click more you will see the last 25.

Mordd – IndyMedia said :

FYI if the new Show More button the Trending Comments is not working for you, you will have to disable AdBlock (plus) for this site or put up with it not working, I tested and all popular ad blockers are currently blocking this tab by accident.

Why are some ‘trending’ threads being shown with 3 or 4 comments and others with just 1?

If they all just had the title and just the last comment (one) there would be space to list more threads as trending.

As I said previously, comments seem to get moderated/released in blocks usually it is about 5-6 sites trending at the same time…then nothing for hours and hours (sometimes up to 48 hours).

Mordd - IndyMedia10:32 pm 17 Aug 16

FYI if the new Show More button the Trending Comments is not working for you, you will have to disable AdBlock (plus) for this site or put up with it not working, I tested and all popular ad blockers are currently blocking this tab by accident.

FYI @ New Owners, other than that, all standard ad blockers block all ads on the new site, and so many users use an adblocker these days, you will be losing ad revenue unless you bring in an option for $5 / month subs for no ads, for those of us who hate browsing with ads but still want to support the site financially.

Mordd - IndyMedia10:38 pm 16 Aug 16

So since we’re speaking about controversial ideas like no moderation for comments….

What do other readers think of adding the ability to upvote/downvote comments?

Personally I would love this feature, but I worry it could lead to petty vote wars like happens on some sites. Some sites it works great, others not so much. Not sure if it would work here or not, but I would be curious to try it out and see and revert back if it failed.

Mordd – IndyMedia said :

I would like to add a +1 to going completely unmoderated for commenting. With reporting comments and applying moderation enforcement to only those that need it applied to them, and the ability to blacklist users you don’t like, it is probably time to do away with the forced moderation for all comments.

I quite like the moderation – r/canberra on Reddit often links to RiotACT articles and is unmoderated, and the quality of the comments is rubbish, and often defamatory. I do agree that moderation could be a bit quicker, though – it would help to promote discussion if there was more frequent posting of comments.

Mordd – IndyMedia said :

Ok so after some further testing, a new bug identified, and some more info on the login problem.

If you come to the site logged out, it loads the new logo as the icon in the tab in the browser. When clicking to login, it changes to the old logo in the tab on the login page. Once logged in from the main page, it redirects you to the admin section, which also shows the old logo in the tab in the browser, then when you go back to the site front page, it changes the tab icon back to the new logo again. Logging in from an article takes you directly back to that article though after logging in. Hope that helps.

This is pretty much what is happening to me too when I log in.

Mordd - IndyMedia4:27 pm 16 Aug 16

Ok so after some further testing, a new bug identified, and some more info on the login problem.

If you come to the site logged out, it loads the new logo as the icon in the tab in the browser. When clicking to login, it changes to the old logo in the tab on the login page. Once logged in from the main page, it redirects you to the admin section, which also shows the old logo in the tab in the browser, then when you go back to the site front page, it changes the tab icon back to the new logo again. Logging in from an article takes you directly back to that article though after logging in. Hope that helps.

Mordd - IndyMedia4:04 pm 16 Aug 16

I would like to add a +1 to going completely unmoderated for commenting. With reporting comments and applying moderation enforcement to only those that need it applied to them, and the ability to blacklist users you don’t like, it is probably time to do away with the forced moderation for all comments.

Also need to find a way to be able to click on specific comments like before and get straight to that point in the comment thread, even a “show new” function that automatically takes you to the last unseen comment would work also. Also need to expand that list somehow to around 10 articles in the Recent list, unless you can get the other 2 tabs functioning properly and they actually show fairly different selections among the 3 tabs.

Holden Caulfield10:26 am 16 Aug 16

No_Nose said :

Lastly, in regard to the original post comments about ‘introducing the new owners’ – I’ll believe it when I see it! When you changed in 2014 you promised the same thing, and then refused to deliver…even going so far as to refuse to publish any comments which asked about it. (I wonder if this is enough to stop this comment getting through)

This.

Still waiting for the promised announcement of the new owners from back in 2014. Now we discover that not only will never know who they were, but that the site ownership has changed again and…

We still don’t know who owns the site. Maybe the prolonged silence has been a deliberate ploy. Either way RiotACT still has a warm place in the hearts of many Canberrans. It would be a shame to see that sense of goodwill lost completely in the chase or desire for profits.

All-in-all I dislike the new site. It is clunky and difficult to navigate around or to see what is new. There are less stories on the front page and space is taken up by repeating stories. There are only 26 stories showing. The old site had many more older stories listed at the bottom and then another page with further older stories. Are you expecting people to not use the front page and go through all of the categories (news, opinion, features etc) to see what is happening?

Like most websites, when you bring in computer geeks to re-design them they do it in a manner to impress other computer geeks with how clever they are…not with what the actual users need or want.

But I guess we are stuck with it…so here are a few comments/suggestions:

Mordd – IndyMedia said :

when I log in atm, it always takes me to the admin section, not to the page I was on, which is kind of annoying, please fix this asap, thanks!

I thought this was just occurring for me…please, please fix this!

In regard to the “Trending Now” section, it only shows 6 topics which is far too few. It could probably do with showing 15 or so. (it doesn’t need to show the comments – just the headline)

This is particularly important due to the extremely slow moderation/release speeds and the smaller number of stories displayed on the front page. On occasion there can be no new comments for two days, then a heap released at once. With only 6 showing as trending is will be very easy to miss comments on a topic you are interested in.

gbates said :

Does this mean we might expect to see out posts get through moderation in a timely manner?

RiotFrog said :

Do you still have the ridiculous comment moderation in place?

This is without a doubt one of the biggest problems with RiotAct. It is simply too slow to encourage debate or conversation. Have you considered going un-moderated? It is possible to report comments so you should be able to set it up so that if a comment gets a certain number of reports it is automatically removed for review. Posters who are continually removed can be banned or placed in a more permanent moderation, as can persons who are found to maliciously report comments. Many other sites successfully use this method successfully.

If you are not going to do this, can you at least send your moderators on a course in identifying ‘humour’, ‘pop-culture’ and ‘light hearted banter’.

Lastly, in regard to the original post comments about ‘introducing the new owners’ – I’ll believe it when I see it! When you changed in 2014 you promised the same thing, and then refused to deliver…even going so far as to refuse to publish any comments which asked about it. (I wonder if this is enough to stop this comment getting through)

Mordd - IndyMedia10:25 pm 15 Aug 16

Looks good. I would still prefer you consider allowing $5 / month subs to remove the advertising though. Emailed you a list of bugs I found. So far 1 is fixed, Vivaldi browser will now login properly instead of failing, yay!

Can we post our own vote polls now in articles? Also can we please bring the community calendar back and allow users to submit short items of interest directly to the calendar in place of tiny articles? Also can we embed youtube videos in articles now?

Still won’t allow me to upload my avatar again after it came through with a much older one in the migration and I deleted that one. Tried to upload a jpg and a png and both just reload and say the profile is updated but I still have no avatar 🙁

Trending now comments are a bit slow to load, initially and when changing tabs. Viewed tab is only showing me pieces from 5-8 years ago, even after spending a few days viewing new articles on the new site design. Popular tab appears to be working as intended, except for the first one it is showing which is from 2009 (with comments last posted in 2009) and I am positive I never viewed it at any point on the old site, so no idea where that is coming from.

Is there a new guideline being added (or already here but I haven’t found it yet) with something about timelines for how long articles take to get viewed and approved and will this be getting any faster, and is comment moderation being spread around more people to make it more timely overall, especially on weekends when we know you want time off but we want to comment on here and want comments approved that day?

Can you also elaborate on why you choose to remove subs altogether, and what features are being retained (like the avatars – avatars for all? hard to tell atm when the upload isn’t working). Also something on how featured contributors are selected and if new ones will be added over time would be good too.

Mobile optimised site is a long time coming, that’s probably the stand out big change from this overall, so many people read news like this on mobile these days. Have you noticed the new logo looks very similar themed to the Visit Canberra logo, with the blue and the shape?

One last thing, when I log in atm, it always takes me to the admin section, not to the page I was on, which is kind of annoying, please fix this asap, thanks!

Overall a strong foundation in place now on which to build an even better site than ever before and hopefully grow to the visitor number the site used to see a few years ago and even more in the future. According to Alexa the traffic has already grown by 75K daily visitors over the past 9 months after the previous 1 and a bit year slump in traffic, and is back to 350K average visitors as of 2 months ago. Can’t wait to see the future of RiotACT from here on out.

When will you guys have the guts to challenge the bigotry directed towards those who would question that there should be an Indigenous Day public holiday?

Do you still have the ridiculous comment moderation in place?

Does this mean we might expect to see out posts get through moderation in a timely manner?

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