October 2008

Mark annotations for attention

Keeping the annotations tidy requires occasional tending. Despite all the spam filters a few spam annotations get through occasionally, and these only get deleted when someone notices them and emails me. And occasionally there are accidentally duplicated annotations which need tidying up. Also, an unfortunate number of annotations have been truncated during past database moves.

So, many thanks to those who have doing a fine job at calling my attention to such things, particularly Todd, Terry and Dirk.

I’ve now added a little thing to make it easier for people to mark annotations for attention and easier for me to deal with them. At the top of each annotation is a little “Flag this” link. Try clicking one (I’ve posted an example annotation below which you can try). You’ll see a screen that lets you flag an annotation with one of the following:

Spam

If it’s one of the many, and increasingly bizarre, spams.

Truncated

If the annotation disappears abruptly (usually at an apostrophe or similar punctuation mark). These are usually annotations from some time ago.

Duplicated

If there are two identical annotations, usually next to each other, you can flag one of them.

Off-topic

If an annotation is flagrantly off-topic and you’d like to draw it to my attention. It might not need deletion, more of a nudge from me to the author.

Edit required

If an annotation, probably one of your own, needs something corrected. Unfortunately there’s no other way to do this, so this is how.

Other

If there’s another reason, you’re just not sure which category this falls into, choose this.

You can optionally add an explanation, although it’s often not necessary (say, for obvious spam). And you can include your name and email address if you like, which may be useful if it’s something we might need to discuss.

If you change your mind, just hit the ‘Cancel’ button and you’ll be taken back to where you were, no harm done!

An annotation can only be flagged once so the “Flag this” link won’t disappear if someone’s got there ahead of you. You can assume I’ll deal with it soon.

This should all make it easier and quicker for anyone to bring this stuff to my attention, and easier and quicker for me to deal with it. Which should make the place more pleasant for everyone.

Do let me know if you find any problems or have any other comments. Thanks!

1 comment | Permalink | Wednesday 15 October 2008 | New features

Pepys family tree

I’ve put together a Pepys family tree as an alternative way of accessing Encyclopedia pages for all the Pepyses. It’s also hopefully useful as a way of getting an overview of how everyone’s related — it’s a big family!

The family tree is linked to from the Encyclopedia pages of all the people mentioned so it should be ready to hand whenever it’s useful. There’s also a printable PDF version, should you want to keep a paper version to hand.

I’ve tried to keep a balance between having the text big enough to read and enlarging it so much that one can’t view much of the tree at a time. If too many people find the text too tiny I can enlarge it. If you’re using Firefox 3 then you can zoom in using ‘Zoom’ under the ‘View’ menu and the image will be enlarged; I’m not sure if that will work in other browsers.

If you have any suggestions for additions or corrections do let me know.

7 comments | Permalink | Sunday 19 October 2008 | New features

Annotation flagging change

As I feared, spammers have found the form for flagging annotations and have begun submitting spam through it. These days spammers just send spam through any form they can find, whether it does them any good or not.

So I’ve switched on a feature I built into it, just in case, which requires you to answer a (currently very simple) question before you can flag an annotation. Hopefully it will be enough to stump them. We’ll see…

Be the first to comment | Permalink | Sunday 19 October 2008 | Housekeeping