Thursday 26 March 2009

This site will be moving to Intense Debate

If it does not work we will remove it

Very busy at the moment so will have to be brief. This site will be moving to Intense Debate sometime later today.

I have read all your comments on this site and our forum and read your personal emails and good points were made for both sides of the argument and seen from our poll that the support for Intense Debate is very high.

In the end however, I was guided by the experience and recommendations of John of Gwent who I have worked with for many years in the IT business. JoG was once one of my Team Leaders and headed the Systems Testing Team, strange how all those he recruited for his small army seemed to be attractive young ladies but he did assure me they were the best people for the job.

JOG has tested out Intense Debate on his own site and says Go for it. You can read his take on it there.

Our site The Home of the Green Arrow and Friends as already had a very good increase in hit rate from the use of Digg which I should have been faster in embracing.

Using Digg means that the excellent articles written by our writers will have a much longer life than those that that have not been Dug/Digged and will reach a much wider audience, which at the end of the day is the sole purpose of this site.

Having been looking at the benefits of using Intense Debate, I can see huge advantageous that will increase the readership of our blog and hopefully spin off into extra members on our sister site, Home of The Green Arrow forum.

I have been assured that we will lose none of our old comments and they can still be replied to in the old way.

New anonymous comments will not require an Intense Debate Account.


Hopefully after awhile, I should be able to remove moderation except for first time posters.

Being conservative in Nature, I tend to like things to remain the same, especially in my private life but this is different. We must keep the edge over our enemies by using new technology to defeat them. Intense Debate is one way of doing this.

Please guys - it is a done deal so let us not waste time in debating on the site. If we are going to have a moan, can we do it on the forum.

I shall be looking to recruit "moderators" in order to handle the expected increase in comments.

Thank you

Green Arrow

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

One small point GA

Comments DO NOT "require" the user to have an intensedebate account. The blog moderators can set up a flag to demand it. When I turned moderaton on during the testing over on my site, I clicked that as well to see how troublesome it would be. I have now relaxed the requirement.

I would welcome any of our regular stream of anonymous posters popping over to the test post on johnofgwent.blogspot.com and attempting to leave a comment there as an anonymous contributor. PLEASE come straight back and say something here if you cannot do that.

Anonymous said...

It must be encouraging for GA that nobody voted for him to 'just die' in the poll.

Anonymous said...

What are you going to do with people like me GA - people who refuse to put stuff in our machines when someone - anyone - else insists we do?

I'm having this same problem with Virgin and PHORM right now.

The Green Arrow said...

Well Sir Henry as you can see the old articles still use the old ways.

With Intense Debate, you can still post anonymously without having an Intense Debate account.

You do not need to download anything for intense debate. You just register with any email address and pick a user name.

It is only us bloggers who have their code on our machines.

In fact could you try it in the test article please and if no luck return here.

Thankyou

Anonymous said...

Will do GA. Just get a new Hotmail account first.

Please understand this is nothing personal. Perhaps if I knew more about computing and the web I would be happier about it.

And I have to give a certain amount of credit to Virgin - at least they are asking permission to insert the PHORM cookie - which is more than can be said for the other ISPs that are doing it. They tried to convince me it would make my computer more secure and it was for my own good. Ha ... my mother never raised such foolish children.

I suppose it's a minor paranoia really - but I've twice had a serious virus infection, so now I accept nothing I don't particularly want off my own bat, and certainly not if I'm in some way REQUIRED to accept it. It's probably down to lack of knowledge on my part; I do understand that. Assurances don't ever assure me, evidence does - but then, to understand said evidence knowledge is needed - knowledge that I don't have.

PS We're going to have a mass leafleting in Leigh soon - we have to establish that attacking our people with hammers will not frighten us off the streets and out of doing our political duty.