Site Maintenance

Dear Watergirl,

Is it wrong to use the Pie Filter?  Does it make me a bad person?

Dear Of Course It’s Not Wrong,

Why would you even think that?   Of course it’s not wrong to use the pie filter.  There’s only so much time in a day. There’s nothing wrong with using the pie filter for commenters whose comments you don’t want to read, unless that feels wrong to you, or it goes against your principles.

Even if it goes against your principles to pie commenters that you simply don’t care for, or whose comments aren’t of interest to you, there’s absolutely no reason to feel bad about pie-ing some whose primary goal is trolling or what I call “shit-stirring”.  Use the pie filter for them!

Dear WaterGirl,

I tried the pie filter, just for a minute, so I could see the pie images and the quotes.  Now I’m hooked, and I’m tempted to use the pie filter just for fun.

Dear Oh My Goodness, Please Don’t Worry about That!

I mean, seriously, have you seen CatCake?  Who could resist CatCake?  Or the dessert-related quotes… I spent a lot of time looking for the quotes and those images!  Just think of using the pie filter as a kindness, so I know they are appreciated.

If that’s not enough to help you feel good about it, think about John.  He paid good money for the pie filter programming.  With updates!  You now have a choice of images, quotes, or nothing, plus it’s super easy to pie, and to un-pie, and to change the settings.  And if you’re up for a really bold move, you can use the pie filter just because it’s a day ending in ‘Y’!

Dear WaterGirl,

I know i shouldn’t engage with trolls, and I tell myself I won’t make that mistake the next time; I will just ignore them!  But then I do it anyway.  I get pulled in, thinking that I can change their mind, or that it’s important to refute what they say, so it doesn’t just hang there like the lie they just said is true.  I’m doing a service for all of us, and that’s a good thing, right?

Dear I’m Really Sorry to Have to be the One to Tell You,

We all understand the instinct, but engaging isn’t helpful.  It just encourages them, and derails the threads.  The pie filter can help!  You can pie the shit-stirrers and trolls, and reduce the temptation to engage with them.  Plus, it will save you money on meds, because it will help keep your blood pressure down!  Then you can treat yourself to some real live dessert, just for being so good!

Dear WaterGirl,

Some of the regular commenters don’t seem to be posting anymore.  It makes me sad and I feel so frustrated, isn’t there anything I can do?

Dear That Bothers Me Too,

I wish I had a better answer, but the only thing I know how to do is to make sure that I’m not personally involved in turning what would otherwise be a good thread into a steaming pile of you-know-what, or scorched earth.  At Balloon Juice, we are not the enemy. Well, except for the people who are here to stir shit and sow discord.  As far as I’m concerned, we owe nothing to those people; they are not actually part of the BJ community.

What I know is that we have to preserve our collective sanity for the Big Fight of 2020: Saving Our Democracy.  Like it or not, that’s the fight we are in,.  One part of that fight is making sure we’re not driving good people away with our infighting.  One tiny part of that can be using the pie filter, if that’s what it takes to not get sucked into the vortex of people who are on Balloon Juice – not for the politics and pets and food and garden chats or to share our favorite mysteries – but to do harm.

I don’t know that we have to Be Best.  But I do think we need to Be Smart.

***

Discuss:

What has the pie filter done for you lately?

Why is the pie filter worse than Satan?

Why you love CatCake almost as much as I do.

Dear WaterGirl: When is the Best Time for Pie?Post + Comments (310)

Dear Watergirl,

Does Tunch show up on every post, everywhere?  It seems like I see him a lot.  He’s the perfect choice, so I’m not complaining!  I’m just trying to make sense of it.

Dear Just Trying to Understand,

No, Tunch is not on every post.  That awesome picture of Tunch is the default for some things, but not for everything.

Dear WaterGirl,

I see images everywhere, even in places where I didn’t know they existed!  Imagine my surprise the other day when I saw an image when I clicked on one of the wings to take me to another thread.  Where else might I see images?

Dear Surprised,

I may not be able to think of all of them at the moment, but I’ll give it a try.  Sometimes there are images in the post.  Sometimes there are images that show up in the the wings, and it’s not even a picture that’s anywhere in the post.  There are images on Twitter feeds, images on Facebook.  Images that show up with a post in a RSS Reader.  If I think of any more, I’ll add them in later.

Dear WaterGirl,

What’s up with images on the new site?  I don’t understand the logic of what images we see where.  Are you using some kind of image randomizer just to mess with us?

Dear What’s Up With Images,

I would never do that!  But this is a classic example of a situation where if you know the rules, it makes total sense.  But if don’t know the rules?  It’s difficult to reverse engineer and figure out what the rules are.  The short story is that it’s pretty much up to the front pagers to determine what pictures show up where.

Dear WaterGirl,

If everybody doesn’t have to use the same images, and front pagers can do what they want…

Could Cheryl always use that map I’ve seen a couple of times?
Could Betty use a picture of Badger?
Could Mayhew use an abacus?
Could Tom use a printing press?
Could TaMara use a duck?

Dear My, You Have Given This a Lot of Thought!

Yes, if they wanted to, each front pager could have a standard featured image on most or all of their posts, that could be a brand, of sorts.  Their posts would be known by the company they keep could be easily recognizable from the image that shows up.

Dear WaterGirl,

I saw that a couple of commenters had added an image directly into their comment, and they weren’t even front pagers.  How come they get to do that and I can not?!  It’s not fair!  Or can we all do that, and I just don’t know how?

Dear It’s Not Fair!

Only front pagers can add images in the comments.  That’s the plan, anyway!  I turns out that we have some clever commenters who like to test the boundaries, and sometimes they find a way around things. That’s okay, that just helps us make the site more secure.  They find ‘em, we block ‘em. :-)

THAT’S ALL THE LETTERS FOR TODAY.  I’LL CONTINUE TO DO THIS FOR A BIT UNTIL EVERYBODY IS UP TO SPEED.

Please feel free to snack on some cake while you read.

Dear WaterGirl: So Many Image Questions!Post + Comments (120)

Dear WaterGirl,

I just travelled around the world in my hot air balloon, and now that I am back, I’m wondering if you guys made any changes to the new site while I was gone.

Dear Wow, That’s Amazing!

And here I thought we had accomplished a lot this week!  Let’s see… We switched from the lovely blue-green-gray background on block quotes to a possibly-more lovely blue outline with a shadow.  People seem to like that a lot; hopefully you will, too.

We increased the size of the space you get when you press RETURN, so we think people won’t feel the need to press RETURN twice between their paragraphs.  That should go a long way toward decreasing extra white space we’ve been seeing.

We also made a change to the comment numbers; they are a bit smaller and should size better on all devices.  (Bye-bye tiny little numbers on phones!)  Oh, and we changed the pie filter font that you see when you select quotes instead of images.

Dear WaterGirl,

What about the loyal On the Road people?  What have you done for us lately??  Writing not just for myself, you understand, but for all of us.

Dear On the Road Peeps,

Well, let’s see.  We moved On the Road from Featuring in the sidebar to the category bar at the top.  We hope that was a nice surprise! But we took away something, too; we hope you won’t mind.  You won’t see duplicate images anymore when the most recent post on Balloon Juice happens to be an On the Road post.  Going forward, you’ll just have to be satisfied with a single copy of all those gorgeous images.

Dear WaterGirl,

Have there been any changes that would specifically affect front pagers?  We love change!

Dear Front Pagers,

At long last, we added a plugin for filtering Categories and Snark to the Classic Editor, so those of you who don’t typically use the Block Editor won’t have to go to the Dark Side for ease of adding categories and snark to posts.

Dear WaterGirl,

Are there any little things we might want to know, that we may not know already?

Dear Inquiring Minds…

Yes!  That’s an excellent question!

Did you know you can make the comment box longer, so you can see your entire comment, even if it’s long?  Just drag the little thingie (technical term) that’s at the bottom of the comment box until it’s the size you want.  The little thingie is to the right of the little P that people ask about, and it works in the Reply box as well as in the comment box at the bottom.

Speaking of the little P, what does it do?  P stands for Paragraph, so it’s saying you are in Paragraph mode.  If you put your cursor inside a blockquote, it will say P and Blockquote.  If something is in color, it will say P and Span (which indicates color).

Speaking of white space… the block quote feature automatically adds space around the outline of the quote, so now if you add an extra line manually, either above the quote or after it, you get a boatload of extra white space.

The RSS feed now includes the name of the BJ author, but that won’t show up in your old feed; in order to see it, you have to subscribe again.

Sometimes we refer to a location for something on the site as if that location is true for everybody.  (I am definitely guilty of this!)  For instance, the Pet Calendar Info is located at top right on the site, but only for computers and for tablets that are in landscape mode.  Tablets in portrait mode, and phones, will show that under the hamburger. (aka the 3 lines located top right on a phone)  The same is true when we talk about the sidebar – that’s only true on computers and tablets in landscape – on a phone, or a tablet in portrait mode, that’s all located after the comment window at the bottom.

THAT’S ALL THE LETTERS FOR TODAY.  I’LL CONTINUE TO DO THIS FOR A BIT UNTIL EVERYBODY IS UP TO SPEED.

Dear WaterGirl: Did You Know…Post + Comments (66)