Very shortly, I will begin posting on Wordpress, using the premium site I set up last year, which will be moved to TalkLeft.com so the web address doesn't change. You can view it here. (Keep in mind I've ignored it for months, so it will be freshened up and may not look exactly the same as it does now.)
How I decided this: As I was designing and setting up Marijuana Laws the past few weeks, I realized just how outdated this site has become since 2002, when it began. It is also too loaded down. There are well over 1 million comments as of this week, and 11 years' worth of posts.
What remains to be seen is whether I start fresh with the Wordpress version, and just flatten and close this Scoop version of TalkLeft, moving it and the Duke and Z. forums to a shared server at a fraction of the current hosting cost, or attempt to have the many thousands of posts here imported to the Wordpress version, so there is just one complete version of TalkLeft.
The answer to that question, in great part, is up to readers. Since there no longer is ad revenue and I don't want to charge for reading, reader donations are essential to cover the cost of importing the posts here into Wordpress. Colin, our webmaster, thinks it can be done. (There's no guarantee.)
For the past several years, I have asked for reader donations for the site about twice a year. It's been 7 months since I last asked, so it's time.
As regular readers of this site know, I took a hiatus from blogging from October to Christmas, just posting open threads so readers could continue to communicate with each other. Obviously, site traffic sharply declined because of it, so there are fewer people who will see this message. That makes it more important that those who are still here and appreciate TalkLeft contribute now. Otherwise, there certainly won't be sufficient funds to merge the sites, and there will be a TalkLeft archive site and a new site.
Some other things you should now:
1. Either way, I intend to eliminate comments posted before 2011, keeping only those from 2011 through 2013. There's just no reason to keep the site bogged down with more than a million comments. (I last purged comments in 2006 or 2007.) If you want to preserve your comments, you should start reviewing them and saving those you want to your hard drive now.
2. You have to re-register your screen name at the new site. User registrations can't be transferred. To compensate for the inconvenience, if in the future I decide to charge for premium access, I will give all those who register before the site moves to Wordpress a free pass for at least a year. Since the Wordpress site has been up for months, you can register there now.
Some advantages to readers once I start posting on the Wordpress version:
- You can subscribe to comments on any particular post, being notified when new ones are posted on a thread you are interested in.
- While I still discourage it, you can post url's in comments without using html. They won't skew the site as they do here.
- There will be virtually zero spam, as I have Akismet, Stop Spammers and Wangguard installed on it. I can also block user registrations by country. Thousands of attempts have been blocked and none have gotten through since since the wordpress site went up last year.
- There will be no comment-rating system. There's also a plugin I'm looking at where I can put specific users on comment probation. That would avoid my having to entirely ban those users who forget that personal insults aren't allowed here.
- The site has a responsive layout, which means it will display nicely on your desktop, laptop and mobile device. The fonts are also larger and much easier to read.
- There is the option, if I decide to do it, of including forums on the main site. With forums, readers can start their own discussions without concern for being "off-topic". They can also "private-message" each other, and if they want, share their contact info or thoughts with one or more other users. (The forum decision also depends on donations, as styling them is a huge project which will consume a lot of my time and probably some paid expert assistance. The same is true for incorporating the existing Duke and Z. forums into the site.)
As to whether the site will be just me and almost exclusively related to crime, civil liberties and major elections and legislative initiatives, or whether Big Tent Democrat will return to regular posting, of course I hope so, but that's up to him. He says he will continue his sports posting here, and he will write on other topics when he has something to say and has the time. In other words, he'll write here when he feels like it. I know a lot of readers wish he would post more. My suggestion to them is that when he does post, readers leave positive comments, or at least thoughtful ones, and if they disagree with him, they do it without personally attacking him. No one wants to spend an hour or more writing a post only to have their views attacked or challenged with false information, or their remarks misinterpreted by a string of commenters.
So for this new year, the direction of TalkLeft is largely up to readers. I will keep blogging, I still have lots to say about the topics and cases I'm interested in. But I do view reader response to my donation requests as a measure of appreciation for the time and effort I put into blogging, and response to this request for donations could well affect the frequency and depth of my blogging. (Translation: If almost no one donates, I'm not going to feel obliged to blog multiple times a day, or perhaps even daily.) Big Tent Democrat will join in when he wants to, regardless of donations.
It hasn't mattered to me for a long time how many readers we have, since traffic stats are mostly useful for ad purposes, and I'm keeping the site ad-free and access-free for now. But personal funding of the site is another matter, and I'm not willing to keep paying thousands of dollars a year in hosting or professional web developer fees, when I can flatten this site and keep it for posterity at a shared server at almost no cost, and do the same with a new and fresh Wordpress version of the site.
If you'd like to donate, you can do so at the links below. You don't need a Paypal account, you can use a credit card. Or you can use the links on the right hand side of the site. All amounts, even a few dollars, are welcome, and please don't give more than you can comfortably afford.
Happy New Year to all of you, and thanks especially to those of you who kept the conversation going here during my hiatus. If you have questions, post them in comments and I'll try to answer. Constructive suggestions are also welcome.
