Site Update: October 2012

by Jamie Frater

It has been some time since our last site update and this weekend we are transitioning Listverse away from WordPress VIP to a new host WPEngine. Part of this move means that all users who registered with WordPress will not be able to use their WordPress account to login for commenting purposes. But there is definitely a silver lining to this cloud as you will see…

We have moved all of our comments to Disqus – a very highly regarded commenting system that allows logins to Listverse from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Disqus and Listverse directly. Also, when you sign up with Disqus you can create your account with your twitter or Google login. At the moment all comments on Listverse from the past are unclaimed – but if you sign up with Disqus using the same email address as the one you have used to comment here in the past all of your old comments will be associated with your account! You can even add more emails to your Disqus account if you have commented under multiple addresses here. We are still allowing anonymous commenting as well – but the social features (such as notifications, following other commenters, etc.) make it well worth signing up.

Regardless of how you sign on, the new commenting system gives us all these new features:

1. Post images and videos directly into your comment; simply drag and drop the image on your comment field or click the “upload image” icon. For videos just include the Youtube link.

2. Bold, italic, underline text using HTML markup.

3. Edit or delete your comments

4. Get notifications on new comments or replies to your own comments

5. Reply to as many comments as you like without leaving the page

6. Live discussions: See a notification when new comments are posted without leaving the page – comments stream to the page in real time! You can even see when someone else is typing a reply.

7. See top commenters and top discussions around the site – that way you won’t miss out when an old topic is sparked alive by incoming traffic from another site

8. Voting on comments and sorting comments based on rank, or date

9. Social sharing: share your comments or other’s comments on social networks

10. @mentions – using @username in your replies will notify the person that you have spoken to them

11. Reactions on lists are drawn in from twitter so you can see what others are saying about a list.

In order to boost page load times and reduce site noise we have removed a further two advertisers (we removed a number of them last year already). We are now left with four advertising companies all serving their ads through one central ad server – this means we get the fastest possible load time – something I am sure everyone will be pleased about. Since the move to clean up the advertising here we have removed: popunders, text links, image advertising, context based advertising blocks; and we have reduced the overall number of the remaining ads. We hope this makes your browsing experience of Listverse better.

We are in the process of creating a list submissions builder – it will make it much easier for you to send us your lists. The scope of the job is beyond me so we have contracted another company to do this work for us. The new builder will appear in the near future. You will still be able to submit lists via a freestyle text area but the builder will make that seem boring!

We have been planning for some time to have a complete rewrite / redesign from scratch of Listverse. This is something I hope to see happen this year. All of the features will remain but speed should be improved as well as usability. We will also incorporate new features that we have been wanting for a long time. There will more on this as our plans unfold – stay tuned. Now stop reading and sign up with Disqus via the comments to start using our new features.