ACD Site Update Nearly Done

J.J. Jackson* | January 25, 2008

I want to thank everyone for their patience over the past three and a half weeks as I have been working on updating the look, feel and performance of American Conservative Daily. It’s been no small feat, but it is nearly done. There is just some layout tweaking that is needed.

Some of the changes you will have noticed:

New look and feel of homepage.Effective use of space is always important and you’ll notice that I have rearranged the way current posts are viewed on the home page. You will also notice the addition of recommended reading links as well as other features such as archives of recent posts from our most often viewed categories to help keep you up to date on them.

You will also notice that I have removed the direct “comment” links for posts from the home page. Why? Because as this site has exploded in the number of visitors it is drawing trolls would read the excerpt on the front page, click the comment link and then leave some nonsensical rant without actually reading the entire post. This way now you at least have to go to the post before commenting.

It also provides spam bots with a harder time to spam the comments section. Even though our spam filters are top notch, the fact that there was a direct link to the comment section on the main page was allowing them to place undo load on the system.

Since this change was made a week ago, load from spam bots is down 99%.

Temporary removal of Recommended Books following new posts.Why? Because the method I had been using with Amazon was causing pages to load very slowly at times when there was a lot of load on the servers or not at all causing the layout to break. They will return in the future at some point but not for now.

What we have now is a script from Amazon that links relevant text in posts to items on Amazon. These links are served by Amazon and should not be considered as endorsements by myself or this site for the products.

Removal of the inside joke from the Right Things Ad.It was cute before the site started to grow so much to receive that email or two a day complaining about the “misspelling” (the use of “of” instead of “off”) from people who didn’t understand the joke or the reference but now that this site is attracting millions of unique viewers a year I’ve grown weary of explaining it to people who are really just trying to use it as a way of discrediting this site and the opinions here.

Sorry long time members, but it along with other inside jokes imbedded around the site have been removed.

New “I Hate You” Thread.Comments that have no purpose other than trolling or ranting about this site will now be moved and archived into the “I hate you” thread to keep them separate from legitimate discussions of issues in posts.

Moderators Now Have Titles Added.To avoid confusion among those that are now coming to the site, I have added titles to the moderators so people will know who they are and not be confused when they give directives.

The following shall now appear:

PinguMama (Sr. Moderator)

RonniesRayGun (Moderator)

Red Tornado (Moderator)

Libertarian Prince (Moderator)

New Member Features.If you are a member you’ll notice a lot of new features in the member section of this site. You can visit there and take a look around. The members message board has been updated and revamped as well.

Membership registrations are still closed however. We are not accepting new members to the private side of this site at this time because the community is strong and the way we like it right now. However in the future we will be opening up a new level of site membership and promoting all existing members to “Gold Membership”.

The “Gold” level of membership will be for people who have been with this site since near the beginning and of course will remain free of charge. “Gold” level members will have access to their own forums and member side features that new members will not. Further details on this will be available as it comes time to implement this change.

What hasn’t changed?American Conservative Daily hasn’t changed in terms of the great commentary that we have become known for. We still are committed to providing insight into the news and events of the day and plan on doing it for quite some time.

With the grace of God we will continue to grow and be a thorn in the side of liberals, anarchists and wanna-be conservatives for years to come!

Contributor's website: http://www.libertyreborn.com

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