A Letter Submitted to the PJM Editors

(submitted to PJM & also on the BC thread "The Knife's Edge")

What follows is the comment that I just left on The Belmont Club. My user name is Lifeofthemind. As I prefer to blog anonymously please do not publicly link my user name and my real name.
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This new comment format is a disaster. How could Pajamas Media do this to us without any warning or request for feedback? The Tocque inputs at the bottom of the comments are no longer there, so all that effort that people put into it is now wasted. My blog is largely based on linking back to comments in here and those links no longer work because the comment numbers have been stripped off. To say that I find this disappointing is a mild understatement. I hope that Richard can get in touch with Roger Simon and try to get things restored. This is depressing.

I just looked around the PJM site and saw that other blogs have a modified version of the new format in which comments are numbered but the numbers are not active, that is you can not right, or is it left?, click them to create a link. They do have a more prominent ‘Reply’ button.

Conservative should mean don’t make things worse.

I also dislike the button for the subscription opt in which has to be unchecked every time or it generates spam, if you are already a subscriber that should be disabled.

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(this is my follow up in the thread)
I just verified that the internal comment numbers still exist within the html and can be retrieved laboriously if I wanted to go through the archives and rewrite my blog thread by thread to recreate the links. Those are not the meaningful sequences for the comments within a thread but are the internal PJM database log numbers. For example my last comment is #154 within the thread but there is no way to find that now. The last comment is traceable as http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/04/01/the-knifes-edge/#comment-101800.

The subscription button is now defaulting to unset.

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It must be fun in the PJM bunker right now.

The Club threads were down and bouncing me back to the PJM front page for a while. Let us hope that they restore Tocque compatibility and the numbers/ back links.

Remind me again how much better life will be with all your most important information stored in digital format under the control of trained technical professionals.

Now I have no name preloaded in the box. That problem with user's emails being revealed we had before, when the edit feature was introduced if I recall.

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Great, while I can embed a link, as I do in my first sentence above, in this new PJM format it does not show as a changed font against the gray background. So the work we all do inserting links, as I often do to vids, is essentially wasted, since no one will actually know they are there.