chainsmoker: "It's the only site I'm aware of that lets commenters decide for themselves what they think is worth discussing."

digg does a similar thing, the differences being more a matter of scale. There are so many stories submitted to digg they have a voting system to decide on what stories appear on the front page.

Anyway thanks for the reply. Curiosity prompted the original query, but after posting I started wondering if you thought some of the things suggested might alter the tone of the forum. That wasn't my intention. So then of course I started to think about why OLO is the way it is, to get a feel if any of the changes might effect it.

This is the list I came up with:

- Size: its comparatively small, unlike just about every commercial US site. You can read every interesting article and every comment in a reasonable amount of time.

- Articles: the Journal, which is what I suspect everybody finds first, has 1K..2K word articles. Most sites content themselves with abstracts of a few hundred words at most, and most commentators appear to come from people who haven't read the full article. You have to read it here. This appeals to a very different sort of person - one who doesn't mind detail.

- Ditto for the comments. They aren't threaded, so again you have to read all of them.

- Many sites are user moderated in some automated fashion. The manual moderation here gives much better results. There are other sites with manual moderation, but the consistently light hand applied here is unique.

- The quality of the comments here are by far and away the best I seen on any general news site. I suspect this is because Graham and friends seem to have hit on some magic formula with their posting limits.

- In the Journal, there seems to be some real editorial skills at work in the choice of articles. The editors know what will make the site interesting.

Everyone: please add to this list. What have I missed?

RobP: "So, I'm guessing the software spat the dummy when it read the first double-quote."

By George, your right, RobP. The same thing happened in the case Ludwig pointed out. How good are we? We find OLO's problems, and diagnose their cause as well! We are almost doing Dewi's job for him. I just wonder if they are paying any attention at all?

Ludwig,

While some IT errors may at first appear weird, there is always a rule behind it. As a programmer for part of my job, I'm always on the lookout for funnies like that. What could have happened is that the double-quote is interpreted as a special control character in the string and not taken literally as it was meant to be.

On the subject of spelling errors, the editor of another website I used to write to said that he/she didn't fix spelling mistakes in the posts because it said something about the author. (It could also have had something to do with him/her not having the time to edit them all.) I guess the same applies to errors in titles.

rstuart,

Yes. Collectively, we are like diligent little bacteria - mopping all the messes up!

Interesting observations rstuart.

Size: Comparisons with the US are pointless for mine. We're a different people. Agree with you on the benefit of small.

Articles: I suspect most of them don't get read properly. Time constraints and comprehension is lower than for print. It's easy to skip straight to comments and gather what the article said from there. Then again, I'm more interested in comments than articles.

Comments: After a while you recognise writing styles and can easily skip comments that are predictable. I've developed the bad habit of only reading comments from people I find interesting, although they're not all people I agree with.

Moderation: Agreed. The 'recommend for deletion' button lets people decide for themselves how they want things to be. It's brilliant.

Quality: Depends what you call quality. OLO has an interesting mix, which is unusual because people usually congregate with others pretty much like themselves.

I like RobP's observation on spelling mistakes saying something about the author. I think that's true. I also think the fact that people here don't criticise others' spelling and punctuation says something.

RobP, regardless of the nature of the IT glitch that is causing truncated thread titles, they should simply be checked before being posted, or corrected ASAP after posting. That should be simple, surely.

In fact, it really is quite bizarre that these truncated titles should be put up, where the whole world can see that there is something fundamentally wrong with OLO…and stay up uncorrected forever. This phenomenon really is most weird!

I see spelling errors in titles and within posts as two quite different things. Titles should be accurate, as they reflect directly on the presentation and management of the forum. Spelling and grammatical errors within posts are the business of the relevant posters and reflect only on them. We should have the expectation that title errors will be corrected by OLO staff. But we could expect the staff to proof-read and correct every post!

However, as I have pleaded in earlier posts on this thread, a poster should be able to correct errors after they have been posted, as from personal experience it is just impossible to make all posts (or even 50% of the little mongrels |:>{ ) entirely word-perfect! And even the tiniest errors can be highly irksome for the writer. Some of us posters really hate errors appearing under their name (or pseudospewodonym)!

[There’s another grossly irritating impossible little error in one of my posts yesterday; “Judy it turned out to be a stooge…” should read ‘Judy turned out to be a stooge’. Rrrrrghh!]