I just got onto OS and I LOVE what you've done with the cover! Thanks so much for the hard work ! As for the picture, good luck. I feel like it's so hard to get a satisfactory profile picture...then again, that's probably just old un-photogenic me...

real nice work on the cover....i mean it.....keep it up....

Ditto what Alysa said. Don't worry about the photo: my driver's license photo is way worse.

Cover's looking good, but logging on, getting to posts, commenting and sending emails has been excruciatingly slow today... hope that has to do with your rework efforts and not another explosion of sports and TV spam. Thanks for your good work!

Nice Job!

More progress and communication in 2 days than in the last 4 yrs.

Thanks!

I'm really happy with the changes, Jake. Some folks are concerned that with the activity feed limited to only comments new writers might be overlooked unless they do a little socializing to get the ratings needed for the top-rated feed. We think also that expanding that feed will enable more posts to get cover exposure with fewer ratings, which can really help new members get recognized.

I'm wondering if registration for membership is still locked out - I can't find the button, has it been moved to someplace else? If it's still locked out maybe the spambots will give and go elsewhere eventually.

Thanks much for being proactive with solving our problems and especially for the courtesy of keeping us informed. Best of luck to you in this job. Hope you stay awhile.

actually,90% of the blogs i read i pick up from the comments......

Thanks for the update, Jake, much appreciated.

Jake, it's great to see your active hands on approach to the site and I'll be interested to see the various changes you implement. Back in the beta days there used to the occasional photo that would spread across the top of the cover spanning both columns. That certainly remains a viable layout option four years later for adding additional variety and excitement to the cover.

If you keep this up, I'm pretty sure you're going to get a Reader's Pick this week. Actually, you've already earned it. A solid "A" on your first week.

Hey there, I thought your photo just made you look really, really thoughtful! I appreciate your being hands-on, and the spam feed seems to have disappeared!

Wow - and ditto everyone has already said. yea, the picture might help with the first impressions thing. this is great news. keep up the good work. truely.

Wow - and ditto everyone has already said. yea, the picture might help with the first impressions thing. this is great news. keep up the good work. truely.

You do look very serious! I like that there is good change moving forward. It's nice to know someone does care....

"but I'd liked to spend more of my time developing story ideas for all of you, and, you know, reading and editing your actual work."

Even mine??? Teehee!! :D

Yeah, get a happier picture, not too happy though, don't want people thinking you're on drugs!! :D

(But your current picture kind of cool though, makes you look like you're in a Goth Band!!! :D)

You have my vote too. (The picture looks like everyone on SKYPE. Not a deal breaker, not really morose, but a low priority).

Jake - it is incredible to see you taking the suggestions of the community and working on them so actively. The cover looks great.

" all the dreck in the Most Recent tab"

That's how we find the new posters, when they're not buried in SPAM, anyway. New people don't get a lot of rates right away.

And the cover looks great. Thanks for that.

just phyllis for now,

You're 100% right, and I don't pretend this is a long-term solution. Just want to make as many recent posts as accessible as possible.

Tink? I think Jake (Jacob?) would (still) look handsome if he puffed a cheese-puffand dangled 'it' from his upper lip. Cheese Twist make a great orange mustache. He's a worker. He be busy Bee. He Beaver too. Hi,
and Hay,
Thanks.
P.S.
Please locate my missing avatars vis Salon or Google? I No know Hi-Teck.
`
- bebop-o

- GoodCelery!

- goat gouda blueberry

- clownsense
`
They first 2 -- @ 2- for $90.00.
They were Gold-Star. Ay no ads.
`
The other two were free avatars.
Who kept deleted? Who? Kerry?
I lost four "free-speech" rights.
`
Great day. Yippee.
You did something.
Farn interns get pay.

You get paid here?
If no? Harvest garlic.
It's harvest garlic day.
You make real money.

I think Jacob (Jake? will have fun.

Jake, you have done an excellent work, spam has disappeared and I am reading writers I have never manage to meet in here. I like the change of the cover, is more useful and working right now. Excellent work, and I must tell you, you are the first editor I have met here, that is actually doing a positive and working work for all of us. You have brought a lot of progress in here, reflecting the quality of Salon.

Maybe now, is the time on making my suggestion of interest, and asking if it would be possible to give more interest in the photograhers in here, by making some challenges or having photo theme essays as your open calls. Just a thinking.

Your image looks great, but believe me your excellent work, has made a lot of good talking.

Rated, with many, many thank you.

Wow, thanks for the reply. :) I know that you're new here and I am giving you a huge chance to do this place up right. Hope you're enjoying the challenge!

Thanks Jacob

just phyllis for now.

You have pleasant manners

That was nice to thank Jake for responding.

In the sad (sigh) past the editor slam doors.
He pretended he had no memory or tongue.
Maybe you can lent Jake your bow tie. Ruff.
He reminds be (Jake) of George Washington.
But, he's not wearing frilled cuff or sneakers.

Thanks so much, Jake. I appreciate all your efforts.
r

Art, thank you for complimenting my manners. Yours are impeccable, as well.

Unfortunately, I do not have a bow tie to loan Jake. And while I do have several bows from my younger days, I don't believe that jake has the hair to pull them off.


Sorry, Jake.

The cover looks great! Very clean and professional yet easily navigated.

Rated for talking the talk and walking the walk.

This could work. I'm all for the changes to the cover, keep fighting the good fight!

I feel like I'm witnessing a good spring cleaning. So impressed with your efforts with only 2 days on the job!

{{grin}}

See? Good people here mostly ;).

Amazing what a turnaround a little listening manages - and the cover does look great, just logged on, happily surprised! Most recent comments is a nice touch..

I'll add a request too, along with the photography - I'm a mere acquaintance of poetry but can recognize that we do have some really great poets.. and they've been promised a 'poet's corner' for forever - maybe you can put that on your to do list in some form or fashion? I know that some kind of 'separate cover space' recognition would be greatly appreciated by them as well (our cartoon artists used to have the top few slots on the OS cover too, maybe you can give them a corner?

Maybe there's a way to do a front cover - inside cover set up? Keep the front cover like it is - add a link to an inside cover for the various fields of writing ; fictions, poets, photographers, cartoonists, etc. Something like that would allow for one page to focus on more timely and not so fiction writings and the other to cover the free range of all that is on offer here.. it would also allow for EP recognition of a broader range of writers :D.

Rated for a bang up job for a first week's effort - hang in there :).

We are just loving Jake up.

He gonna have lipstick stains.

We spoiled Jake in a few days.

He responds to love and dear:
`
phylis for now `? He's handsome.
Jake & Miss P sittinh in the Tree.
Chewing on one` Cinnamon Stick.
`
You never know.
Love is patient.
Love is kind.
Love suffers.
Maybe huh?
Cheers. Ah!
`
In Minds.
Beware.
Stay free.
Be single.
Be merry.

Pleasantly surprised. Thank you.

In fact, it just occurred to me - you've already got a team in place to help with an inside cover effort - the Reader's Picks committee could handle those placements, if they were interested and ya'll could work out a system for it :).

Good start, Jake. Keep it up.

Jake:

Thank you for communicating with us. I feel the source of much of the angst in the past months has been ZERO communication from OS. So along with doing some magic at the keyboard, continuing to communicate with us will win you many hearts and flowers, and God knows what Tink will send your way as a thank you!

Thanks for your responsiveness, Jake.We appreciate it lots, as you can tell!

Rated for great work and using the word "drek."

I like what you did with the left and right margins. This won't stop the spam, but it will keep them off the cover. R

Sweet. You're living up to your last name.

A for effort.

After a morning of getting logged out, booted off the site, having Internet Exploder tell me, "Can't connect to the requested Website" and finally giving up in disgust (thinking, "That Sugar Cube dude is prolly futzing around with settings or something, I'll come back later") I am glad to see the changes you've made today. And when I came back, you still remembered me, how awesome is that?

Kudos and next time, eat something high in sugar and have a lot of caffiene, that should allow you to smile -- or at least pretend to -- when you use your web camera to snap a photo.
--r--

Your voice ... your thoughts ... as you find your way ...
Listening ...
Lovely this ...

Thanks for your hard work and belief in this site.

I love the cover. I keep going back and saying..yes...yes...no more spam. It looks much less cluttered and very sophisticated.

I create web pages so I know what you are going through. All I can do is say thanks!!!

Perhaps I'm set in my ways but I prefer the traditional front page. The Most Viewed in the Past 24 Hours is the least useful & interesting for me so I'd rather see it buried in the scroll down section instead of the top left.

I liked having the 10 or so Recent Comments rather than just 5 as I'd often get attracted to a post by noticing who else was commenting on it.

And the Top Rated Past 4 Hours could easily be pared back to 10 from its current 20 if space is an issue. Nonetheless I'm glad you're taking this seriously.

welcome....

Looks like you took your picture yourself on your computer. Easier to smile at some other actual human who is taking your picture.

(Sorry for first adding this on your Nora Ephron post. Got lost navigating. Trying again in the right place.)

Having recent comments below most viewed is a major downgrade. Here's why: First, “most viewed” really measures “who's googling” and is more of a vanity thing for Open Salon. It measures people getting to something independent of newness and independent of rating. It might at its best capture something where someone made an important cross-reference, but mostly it's a measure of search term effectiveness and a diagnostic tool for you. Second, it doesn't change often. For regulars, this is a huge disservice because if there is something in “most viewed” they either don't care or quickly see it. Either way, if they come back to the front page looking for more, they have to scroll down to find new stuff (“recent comments”) because the static stuff (“most viewed”) is at the top. For this reason, “recent comments” should be at the top on one side and “ratings” at the top on the other. Ratings are at least something that has been vetted by readers as worth seeing, something readers can over time change, and that pay the many good writers back for their tremendous effort in putting out quality free pieces for you guys. Please consider swapping the position of “recent comments” and “most viewed” to put them back in their rightful position. If this site is about the social/community stuff, you have to favor the residents or there's no reason to come back.

Oh, and welcome, by the way. Yeah, we're an opinionated bunch.

SPAM is back.

I concur with Kent about using a longer comments feed and perhaps adding a rating feed (I believe the new feed only shows comments). Usually, most people used the former 'activity feed' to track down articles. I'm okay to remove new posts from the feed to eliminate spam (as a temporary measure).

I'm happy to trade the convenience of an activity feed that rolls out every new post for the luxury of locking out the spam. Of course if the spam starts jamming the comment feed...you'll have to think of another defense. Maybe they'll go away for good when they realize how serious you are about locking them out.

I agree with Kent. Most viewed is a joke. When a topic is under MV it's numbers rise, giving it more of an advantage. Eventually the numbers are out of the park and most of us will never see the day.

Personally I am sick of reading about how much someone learned from opening a bookstore.

Dianne Schuch - Lindsey: Personally I am sick of reading about how much someone learned from opening a bookstore.

I completely agree. This post was written 6 months ago. It has 3,300+ Facebook hits (which explains why it is always at the top of the most viewed feed).

Good work, Jake! wowee. no spam over on the left! Thanks for doing all this. Cheers!

Kanuk and Dianne, Exactly: If people are getting to the page from Facebook, they don't need extra help from the cover. The cover should be there for people who are looking for help finding something.

Matt, I post at Open Salon because I can get seen. If putting a post up doesn't get me some visibility like being briefly in a feed of new posts, how can I get people to notice my page? If I stop getting seen, that will be the end of my posting here. The only payment we get from OS is a little bit of help getting someone to wander in.

Jake, maybe a compromise would be to have new users not show up on the new post feed until a threshold number of existing users had vetted them somehow. You could have a special tab for unfiltered posts by new writers that wasn't directly visible and community members could periodically check for spam (or to read new writers) and complain about new users who were not with the spirit. Then it wouldn feed into the new posts-by-vetted-users feed. I think the key to eliminating spam is to have some sort of karma thing that lets people reinforce who's part of the community and who's not. (Although you might want to consider IP address blackouts for known spammers, so they can't post or don't show up in any feeds no matter what name they come under. It's been theorized that most of the spammers come from one place.)

Just reviewed everyone's comments here. One additional point to make: Ratings and comments should be an integrated feed, like before, I think, because although they are different, not everyone uses both, so sometimes people rate, sometimes comment, sometimes both, but what you really want to know looking at the cover is “is this a post that has recently garnered interest?” and either/both is a yes answer to that question. Plus, some very good posts leave people wondering what to say in response, so they'll be discriminated against if only rated and not commented.

Wow, three communications in one week. You are good! As far as photos I'd rather have someone who is responsive than a pretty picture, but that's just me.

I don't know if I like the new cover because I didn't pay much attention to it after my first month here. When things change and it surprises me, I have to get used to it first. I started tuning out Most Viewed when there was a about a year when Behind Blue Eyes had one post there with photos of a bunch of celebs so it would get a lot of google hits and the other 4 remained the same for months. It just bored me.

I think we all develop our own way of finding posts, so my opinion on it is meaningless. I'm more attracted by the writer, or the title piques my curiosity, than if something is top rated. I skip around with what's on the favorites feed of whatever blog I'm reading, and I use the recent tab and select favorites to catch up. Sometimes when I go to the cover to get to the tab, a title on the comment/rate feed will catch my eye.

I used to use the recent tab all the time to find new bloggers (instead of selecting only my favorites) and I LOVED it but now it has a lot of spam, luckily others find the new ones and hopefully I'll catch them there or in comments. You'll never please everyone but that you're listening and responding is pleasing in itself.

Thank you.

What everyone else says and may your time here be fun and educational.

Looks really nice and more importantly
The EDITOR SPOKE TO US!!!
Wow. Thanks for the update its like God from the mount or something..but seriously, thank you for both.

Welcome and thanks for keeping us posted.

So far, so good. :)

Okay, Jake... I'll give you a big 'ok A+ for effort. I like most of the changes, too. Good job, dude. Tell Kerry to give you a few hundred grand of Joan's salary. At least you're doing something to earn it.

HOWEVER (ya KNEW this was coming, right?), you need to put the Activity Feed back. Comments are not enough. I and a lot of people, at least those of us who give enough of a crap to read new bloggers, use the A Feed to find them.

You can smear all the lipstick on the pig you want, Jake, but it still won't be pretty. Same goes for hiding the spam from view. It's still there, clogging the fuck out of the feed, bogging down everything so that OS ends up running like shit. Both of us know that the spammers could give a rat's ass about being in the feed. They are here for the Google metrics boost that they get from OS. Hiding the spam serves no purpose other than "fooling" the people who have their heads in the sand anyways.

So you'll get no accolades from me for THAT little "trick". Put back the Activity Feed, even though that it shows the spam that is there anyways.

Put the feed back, enough with the "smoke & mirrors" pig lipstick already and fix the freakin problem. (Hint: ReCaptcha!!!!)

This is wild! Who is this handsome(yet morose) Mr. Sugarman, and why is he spoiling us this way? It's as if pigs are flying.
In all seriousness: this is very soothing and inspiring new development. Thank you, Jacob.

keep on keepin on man.....

i hesitate to do this because you will buried with suggestions for awhile.....but....the activity feed not only provided a link to otherwise missed blogs,the comments led to further and deeper discussions of a subject......but hey,it's ur show and at least something's happening.....

Funny. I got to read about tipping in bookstores.

No talk or yodel in used bookstores. Folk snore.

You never know. Former Lawyers may get irate?
I doubt that . . .
Rita S.
Maybe Jake walks with two hands outward to talk.
Jake may sleepwalk?
Jake may Love People.
Jake may fit in and fix:
`
Kerry, my left calf, truck,
and finally talk back to me?
`
`
Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha
`
Gate means gone. Gone. Less misery/suffering
Parasamagate gone over to the other shore. Joy.
Bodhi means Inside Light. It when one wakes up.

Jake ma be adjusting. We give him lots of love.
For all we know he may have ADD. He NSA guy?
I doubt that.
If he no got?
PTSD? huh?
Probably do?
Maybe he will.
`
He can be Good.
Good Gone Gone.

Jake may speak.
Kerry sit on him.
Kerry no speak.

Svaha is a Wonderful Word. Ay Hallelujah shout!
Simple. Joy. Grace. Gift. Ah! Ay Gone Gone Gone!
It's a singing thought with the whole human being!

Nothing at all wrong with your Pic! In fact, in appreciation; I blew it up for my Bedroom Wall! ha ha Thanks for everything Jake! R

Excellent changes! Thank you!

If you know enough to tweak the feeds, please look at this link from the top of the home page:

http://open.salon.com/blogs

It never seems to ever refresh in the two years I've been here. It just seems like it misrepresents the site.

Thanks, and welcome.