Please bear with me on these TypePad problems

This is just to let y'all know that I'm working hard to resolve these problems that some of y'all have identified on the blog (plus some I've discovered myself). I'm just not getting very far.

The problems result from recent changes TypePad has made to the blog platform. Among other things, they have arbitrarily decided that:

• There will be no more than 50 comments on a post, which explains why some of y'all had so much trouble back on this one. This, of course, is totally unacceptable, since that's the point at which some threads on this blog are just getting warmed up.
• A page, including archive pages, will not display more than 99 posts, even if I adjust my preferences to the highest setting. This leads to such absurdities as that fact that if you call up "January 2008" -- a month in which I'm guessing (and since I can't pull up the whole month, all I can do is guess) you only get the month from Jan. 31 back to about Jan. 22. The first three weeks of the month -- the height of blogging about the presidential primaries in S.C. -- are unavailable.

Anyway, just to show you I'm trying, here are my communication threads with TypePad from the last few days:

On Jan 5, 2009 5:54:36 PM, you (Brad) said:

Two problems have cropped up in the comments on my blog in recent days.

First, the names of the commenters are no longer showing up as e-mail or URL links.

Second, quite a few of my readers are complaining that their comments simply aren't showing up. As one of my regulars described the problem, "Same for me. I see the comments count increasing on the 'Wall St./Main Street' topic but don't see anything after your comment on 12/29."

I said I had no idea what was causing the problems, but I would report them...

On Jan 6, 2009 12:18:55 PM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad,

Thanks for the note. Can you provide us with a link to a post where these things are happening on comments? They may be related to current issues that we are working on, but it is helpful for us to see the problem in action.

Please let us know if we may be of further assistance.

Thanks,
Melanie

On Jan 6, 2009 12:31:59 PM, you (Brad) said:

Here's one:
http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2008/12/when-wall-st-woes-hit-main-st.html#comments

Apparently, according to the counter (and this is supported anecdotally by my readers telling me their comments haven't posted), there have been 67 comments on that post. But only 25 show when I call it up.

On Jan 7, 2009 12:12:23 AM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

All the comments are not displaying due to the missing tags for comment pagination. With the new platform, the number of comments set to display on each page is limited to 50. You can change the number of comments set to display at Weblogs > Configure > Preferences.

Additionally, the templates for your blog will need to be updated with the new tags for pagination:
http://everything.typepad.com/blog/pagination.html

If necessary, we can update your templates with the new tags for you.

The commenter name will only display as a link in the footer if a website URL is entered in the comment form if you have the MTCommentAuthorLink tag set to not show the email address:
<$MTCommentAuthorLink show_email="0"$>

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 8, 2009 11:31:10 AM, you (Brad) said:

Jen, that would be absolutely wonderful if you could do that for me.

On Jan 8, 2009 11:46:11 AM, you (Brad) said:

One more thing. I went to Weblogs > Configure > Preferences, and found a 50-POST limit, but saw nothing where I could set the number of comments per post allowed.

FYI, I've had more than 300 comments on a post at times. It would be better to have no limit at all -- I don't want to frustrate my readers -- but if there has to be one, it should probably be 400 or 500. Certainly not 50.

On Jan 8, 2009 7:32:59 PM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

At Weblogs > Configure > Feedback, you can change the number of comments set to display on each page. Right now, we have a limit of 50 comments per page to improve page load times. We are looking into an option for increasing the number of comments allowed, but we don't have a timeline for when a higher number of comments per page will be implemented.

All the templates have been updated with the new tags for pagination. You can change the settings for the index pages at Weblogs > Configure > Preferences. More information: http://kb.typepad.com/id/72/

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 6, 2009 11:32:06 AM, you (Brad) said:

Long ago, when I first started my blog (May 2005), I found a good workaround for the fact that TypePad offers no convenient way to do HTML links or formatting in comments. I did it by composing it as a new post, switching to the HTML tab, then copying and pasting it with the coding into the comment box.

It's very important to me to be able to do this, as my comments frequently are about offering links in answer to readers' questions.

Anyway, one of several chronic problems I've found with this new TypePad platform is that this no longer works. For instance, I just tried to post this comment, with the second, third and fourth paragraphs indented to indicate that they were quoted material. The indents did not work when I copied the coded text into the comment. Here is the coded text:

<p>As for Karen's suggestion that it "Mighta also been good if someone had gone out and determined whether the place was 103,000," someone DID, allegedly. That's one of the many outrageous things about this story:</p>

<p style="margin-left: 40px;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; For a $350 fee, an appraiser hired by Integrity, Michael T. Asher,
valued the house at $132,000. Mr. Asher says although he didn't
personally believe the house was worth that much, he followed standard
procedures and found like-sized homes nearby that had sold in that
price range in 2006.<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "I can't appraise it for the future," Mr. Asher says. "I appraise it for that day."<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; T.J. Heagy, a real-estate agent later hired to sell the property,
says he can find only one comparable house that sold nearby in 2007,
for $63,000.</p><p>So much for <em>that</em> check on the system...</p><p></p>

And you can read the comment, as published, near the bottom of this post:
http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2009/01/the-subprime-mess-in-microcosm.html#comments

On Jan 7, 2009 12:15:31 AM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

Only limited HTML is allowed in comments. It's likely you were using blockquote tags, instead of the indent tags, previously.

For instance to indent a quoted section of text, you would use blockquote tags similar to:

<blockquote>For a $350 fee, an appraiser hired by Integrity, Michael T. Asher, valued the house at $132,000. Mr. Asher says although he didn't personally believe the house was worth that much, he followed standard procedures and found like-sized homes nearby that had sold in that price range in 2006.<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "I can't appraise it for the future," Mr. Asher says. "I appraise it for that day."<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; T.J. Heagy, a real-estate agent later hired to sell the property, says he can find only one comparable house that sold nearby in 2007, for $63,000.</p><p>So much for <em>that</em> check on the system...</blockquote>

The p style tag is not supported in the comments field.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 8, 2009 11:29:53 AM, you (Brad) said:

So what you're saying is, I'm going to have to start entering my HTML coding MANUALLY, because my "compose" page won't code the thing right any more?

I've got to say that this new platform has way more drawbacks than it is worth. For three and a half years, I had this great workaround: I could compose a comment in reply to my readers on the compose form, get it to looking the way I want it on the Rich Text tab, with links and indents and bullets, then copy the version with the coding from the HTML tab over into my comment, and that worked fine.

Now you're saying that won't work any more? Do you have any idea how inconvenient this is?

On Jan 8, 2009 7:34:59 PM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

Thanks for your feedback. The blockquote tool has been removed from the new editor, but we are looking into adding it back in the future. In the meantime, the blockquote tags would need to be manually inserted into your comments.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 8, 2009 11:25:40 AM, you (Brad) said:

Well, this is weird. I was trying to find something I wrote on my blog last January, so I clicked on my "January 2008" link, and all I got was what I posted on January 31 and January 30.

WHERE are the other 29 days of posts?

On Jan 8, 2009 11:42:06 AM, you (Brad) said:

An addendum:

I think I found the problem, but it is not fixable at my end.

I went to weblogs/configure/preferences and found that archives were set to display no more than 10 posts at a time, which of course is ridiculous. I sometimes post 10 times in a day. In January 2008 -- the month of the S.C. presidential primaries -- I'm sure I posted more than 200 times, and probably closer to 300. I can't check now to see, because THE MAXIMUM SETTING ALLOWED IS 50 POSTS.

Which is also ridiculous. You know what 50 posts gives me? It gives me from Jan. 31 back to Jan. 22. So I call up the month, and 21 days of the month don't show.

This is unacceptable, as are many other recent changes to TypePad.

On Jan 8, 2009 7:38:16 PM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

As mentioned previously, the blog had not been updated with the new tags for pagination. When I updated the Individual Archives Templates for comment pagination, I also updated the Main Index, DateBased, and Category archives with the new tags. At the end of the pages, you will now see a Next links to go to the next page of posts.

You can increase the number of posts set to display on each index page to 100 posts by updating the MTEntries tag in the Main Index, DateBased, and Category templates from:

<MTEntries>

to:

<MTEntries lastn="100">

Please note the maximum number of posts allowed on an index page is 100. If you enter lastn="999", only 100 posts will display.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 9, 2009 10:37:39 AM, you (Brad) said:

Jen,

I appreciate that you're trying hard to help me with this. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way of solving my problem without a policy change on TypePad's part.

And this really needs to change. It makes no sense to have, for instance, a link on my blog's main page to "January 2008," when the reader can only see a third or a fourth of the posts from that month when he or she calls it up. I can't even see it myself, which is particularly maddening, since the way I blog, I need to refer back to what I've written in the past A LOT.

So basically I need to know where to go to lobby for this policy change. A limit of 99 posts on an archive page, or a limit of 50 comments on a post, absolutely does not meet my needs, or my readers'.

So where do I go to express this?

Thanks again for your help thus far.

-- Brad Warthen

Comments

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OK, one problem is more or less solved -- I see now that when I call up "January 2008," at the bottom of the page, there's a "next" link where I can proceed to subsequent takes, thereby working my way through the whole month.

I'm almost sure that "next" option wasn't there yesterday -- I looked for it -- but at least it's there now.

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