All things must change to something new, to something strange.
–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Desipio has been around, for better or worse, since July 24, 1997. While most of you have only stumbled upon it in the past year or two, we’ve been here cranking out the funny for more than eight years. Through all that time, the one constant has been change.
When the site first started we tried to cover all of sports, not just Chicago. Then we added entertainment and news, and then dumped those and focused primarly on Chicago sports. We added a message board, and took it away. We changed to the discussion format so that our readers could get in on the fun. We brought the message board back.
And now it’s time to change again.
You will notice, if you haven’t already, that the Daily Doses no longer have a place for the readers to comment. This isn’t, as you might immediately suspect, a reaction to the “joke police” or some running bits of dubious humor content.
It has more to do with the infrequency of Daily Doses we’ve had in the recent past and can continue to expect in the future.
I know, I know, I said I was going to cut back last fall and I ended up writing almost every day anyway, and that might happen this time, too.
But we’re just going to change things a little. The Doses and other columns won’t have comments under them anymore, but the Cubs Live’s (or whatever we’re calling them these days) will still be here and will still work the way we’ve done them all year. Additionally, we’ll do more things like we did on Friday night when Rex Grossman got hurt, where we just post a photo and the “breaking” news and leave a discussion thread open for that.
You’ll still have the Desipio Message Board and the MoranBoard.
So why take the comments off the articles? Because if we’re not publishing full articles as frequently, they just kind of sit there and the comments begin to have nothing to do with the columns. Go back and look at some of the old columns and by the time you get two-thirds of the way down the comments you can’t follow what’s going on anymore.
It’s also a response to the pesky and annoying spam that all sites with comments get bombarded with. I’ve tried to set Desipio up in such a way so that we limit how much spam there is. I tried banning some “keywords” but that only ended up throwing any comment with one of those words in it into “moderation” which honked off the readers who thought I was censoring them.
Basically, I had to make a decision. Do we force everybody to register for the site and eliminate almost all of the spam, or do we just cut down on the number of discussions we have going at any one time? If I forced you all to register it would cut out the ability to post as anybody but yourself during the GameCasts, and there’s a long tradition of doing just that, that frankly, I didn’t want to toy with.
So that’s it. That’s the big change. Whoop-de-damn-doo, I know. I’m sorry it wasn’t something better like funnier jokes or better writing. Well, tough shit.
The Doses are likely going to change a little, too. They tend now to be very long diatribes followed by a page of links and pithy one liners. You might start to see the number of links decrease (especially since most of you have read the articles by the time I get the Dose posted anyway), with more comment on fewer links.
And quite frankly, I need to get back to writing more columns. Maybe the Front Office will make a comeback? (Loud booing fills the Internet.) Anyway, enough about that.
