Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

The willow is too close to the house.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

I’m just a talker, trying to find a channel!

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Cole is on a roll !

Elections aren’t won by handwringing, cowering, and/or bashing your own candidates.

Fuck that bum, let’s go Joe!

In my day, never was longer.

If West Virginia and San Francisco had a love child.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

You are here: Home / z-Retired Categories / Previous Site Maintenance / Site Changes: User Suggestion, Your Input Sought

Site Changes: User Suggestion, Your Input Sought

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Folks,

A very good idea was suggested by commenter Clay:

Could you or another Front Pager put a link (or set of links) on the side bar to click on when we want to call Congress? Like, maybe a link to a list of phone numbers for Congressional offices, and a link to the “how to talk to staffers” post that’s come up before, and whatever else might be useful. That would give us a handy resource for instant action.

I think this is a great idea but there is, of course, no ready-made solution for this. I did some preliminary searching for WordPress plugins, but they are all a bit different than our needs. So I think we could do this ourselves, perhaps with a bit of crowdsourced work looking up info and putting it into a spreadsheet.

Proposed Solution

I’m thinking a “Contact Your Congress” button.

Click that, and you go to a page where you enter your address and it looks up the info and tells you who your reps are, their numbers for both national office as well as all state branch offices. It would of course give mailing addresses, email addresses, and fax number. If this works well, it might make sense to do something similar for state reps and senators as contacting state government is often very effective compared to the Feds.

This page would also have some general tips for such communication.

Finally, I’d prefer it if there was a clickable button that would start a pre-addressed blank email that you can type into, then hit send (all done using whatever email system or program you use, nothing to do with Balloon Juice.)

 

So, what do y’all think? And how should it work from the user experience side of things?

I am making no promises, and will need the help of others to make this happen, but if we get a good plan, I think we can get this done and further improve our collective contact efforts.

Reader Interactions

68Comments

  3. 3.

    Yarrow

    The “Contact Your Congressperson” sites already exist. You could just add a link or button to one of those. You’ve already got links/buttons to Amazon, Balloon Juice Store, etc. Could you just add one like those?

    Or, under “Quick Links” you could add another category for “Contact Your Congress” and have stuff there.

  4. 4.

    Ohio Mom

    I don’t have any thoughts on this matter, just wanted to say Thanks Alain for everything you do.

  5. 5.

    Another Scott

    Thanks for doing this, but don’t reinvent the wheel.

    E.g. CallYourRep.co seems to work fine for me just entering my Zip code (one can give a full address for Representatives that straddle Zip codes). Scroll down for the JSON and CSV files with all the data.

    Collecting the relevant “how to” posts here would be very nice.

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  7. 7.

    Paula

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: I asked about this once too. Is there some reason why comments aren’t nested? WordPress certainly allows for it — there’s a couple of ways to do it. (I build WP sites and I’ve done it.) What am I missing?

    But also please note I appreciate the site and Alain’s hard work!!!

  8. 8.

    a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)

    Maybe a link button to 5 Calls would be simpler. When I type in my zip code and select an issue before Congress, it gives me my representative’s number. For some issues, it gives other numbers–the special prosecutor item gave me the Justice Department’s number, for example.

    It doesn’t seem to give Senators’ numbers, but the Senate has a page for that, as does the House, of course. So maybe just buttons linking to those two sites would be simpler. I do like 5 Calls, as it gives me some additional issues to ponder, and can give some help with expressing one’s concerns. But I think using someone else’s work via link would make your life a lot easier, which is worth considering, especially when updates are considered.

    I also have the local and DC contact number for both Senators and my Representative saved in my phone, just to make nagging easier, but getting the numbers so you can do that is the first step.

  9. 9.

    Yarrow

    @Another Scott: Yeah, that’s my thought too. The sites are already there. Just link to them. They’re not that hard to google, though.

    @Paula:

    I asked about this once too. Is there some reason why comments aren’t nested? WordPress certainly allows for it — there’s a couple of ways to do it. (I build WP sites and I’ve done it.) What am I missing?

    John hates it and has said no.

  11. 11.

    Another Scott

    @Paula: The Boss (JC) and several long-time posters are of the VERY STRONG opinion that threaded/nested comments are the Devil’s spawn. There’s no convincing them.

    A bit on JC’s thoughts on the topic are here.

    HTH.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  13. 13.

    J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford

    Whenever I see your name at the top of a post I always read it as you’re the site fixer…like the Winston Wolf of Balloon Juice. I expect you to be on call if anyone at this site finds themselves in a compromising position.

    DougJ: I don’t wanna hear about no motherfucking ifs! All I wanna hear from your ass is, “You ain’t got no problem, DougJ. I’m on the motherfucker. Go back in there, chill them juicers out and wait for the cavalry, which should be coming directly.”

    John Cole: [calmly] You ain’t got no problem, DougJ. I’m on the motherfucker. Go back in there, chill them juicers out and wait for Alain, the site fixer, who should be coming directly.

    DougJ: You sending the Alain, the site fixer?

    John Cole: Feel better, motherfucker?

    DougJ: [grinning] Shit, yeah, Juicero! That’s all you had to say!

  16. 16.

    MikeinArlington

    On my win10 laptop on Firefox the site defaults to about 1/5th of the screen width and I have to widen it. FYI…

  17. 17.

    Yarrow

    @craigie: I hate them too. On longer threads it’s impossible to find new comments because they’re all over the comments section.

  19. 19.

    Paula

    @Another Scott: (Also Omnes Omnibus and Yarrow) thanks for the explanation re: nested comments. So the feeling among the nest-dislikers is they cause “vicious feedback loops”? (This from the John Cole post Another Scott linked to.)

  21. 21.

    A Ghost to Most

    A pox on threaded comments.

    Also, in the category of wingnut assholes falling upward, Milo Y. Gets $12M to create travelling wingnut tour thedailybeast

  28. 28.

    Yarrow

    @Paula:

    So the feeling among the nest-dislikers is they cause “vicious feedback loops”? (This from the John Cole post Another Scott linked to.)

    In the post you mention “vicious feedback loops” is not used in connection to discussion of threaded comments. That phrase is used in regard to the comments about the site upgrade that was happening at the time of that old post.

    @debbie: Agreed.

  29. 29.

    Another Scott

    @Paula: Display of comments on discussion boards is a problem that was solved decades ago (NNTP/USENET). Unfortunately, all the good stuff about that system was thrown away when everything was “reinvented” for the web.

    Ideally, users would be able to pick how they want the discussion to be displayed to them (nested, threaded, flat, etc., etc.) and we wouldn’t need to have these arguments. But it’s a lost cause.

    I understand the desire of many here to avoid threaded comments (they’re badly done on Disqus), but the “flat” system here is very inconvenient for people who can’t camp out on B-J for hours at a time.

    Anyway, it’s a lost cause. WP is “never” going to be an excellent discussion-board system, and replacing WP with something else is too much to ask (and has too many downsides). We get to live with JC’s choices, and that’s fine!

    My $0.02.

    Cheers,
    Scott.
    (Who misses Souper/Yarn)

  31. 31.

    Uncle Cosmo

    It would be nice if one could call up a poster’s home location (not necessarily where s/he is at the moment, just the home city/town & state) by hovering over the name. Failing that, how about a sidebar link to an alphabetized list? It’s damn annoying when someone posts “it’s raining/snowing/flooding here” & you don’t know where the fuck “here” is.

    But I guess all the Kewl Kidz here already know where they’re all from, & the rest of us can go fuck ourselves…

  36. 36.

    Yarrow

    @Paula: I’ve already explained my thoughts on threaded comments above. As have others. See, for example, my comment at 17.

    Take it up with Cole if you want to pursue it. Good luck with that.

  38. 38.

    Yarrow

    @Another Scott:

    I understand the desire of many here to avoid threaded comments (they’re badly done on Disqus), but the “flat” system here is very inconvenient for people who can’t camp out on B-J for hours at a time.

    I find it the opposite, actually. I have been on a site with nested comments and if I missed a thread with a lot of comments and wanted to catch up I found it really hard to do. I find the flat commenting style much easier. New comments go at the bottom and you can just work your way down from the top. Use the “back” button if you want to see what comment someone is replying to. A little kludgy but much easier to follow the evolution of a discussion than long nested comment threads with comments all over the place.

  39. 39.

    Paula

    @Alain the site fixer: Treading carefully as this is apparently a delicate topic — if there was a plugin that could do it, might we have “optional” nested comments? IE — pick the way you’d like comments to display? Nest for we nesties, and no-nesting for those non-nesties? Or is nesting anathema, even if entirely optional?

  41. 41.

    Uncle Cosmo

    Here’s another idea, for “those of us who can’t hang out here all day”: It would be nice to have some way to “bookmark” the last comment read in a post (say when you click away) so that the next time you enter the comment section of that post the site takes you down there. I am constantly having to scroll down, down, down while trying to remember where I left off reading. If there’s a way to do that already, I’d appreciate knowing about it.

  42. 42.

    Uncle Ebeneezer

    @Paula: I haven’t been there in years, but Bloggingheads used to have that option. It was nice to have that choice, but I can deal either way.

  43. 43.

    Yarrow

    @Uncle Cosmo: Click the highlighted blue date and time on the last comment you read. It’s a link to that comment. You can then leave your tab at that point so you’ll know where to start from.

  45. 45.

    Alain the site fixer

    @Uncle Cosmo: I’ll look at that capability again. It was handled via CSS and was quite wacky as I recall. And like so much for WordPress it assumes nested comments. I don’t think that a site can have both without ripping out the old commenting system. And one core value is that all comments are saved on John’s server and not some third party.

  46. 46.

    Another Scott

    @Yarrow: You’re referring to a poorly-done threaded/nested system.

    Back in olden days, your “news” reader kept track of when you were done with a thread or subthread (you would “mark [it] read” and it would keep track of each message in that thread (via the unique message header) and only show you new messages (if that’s what you wanted to see) the next time you refreshed the thread). If there were people you didn’t want to read, it was easy to put them in your “kill file” – you didn’t need Cleek’s magic. If there were people that you always wanted to read, the reader could automatically highlight them and the thread for you. Etc., etc.

    As I said, these problems and more (replies being in multiple threads, moving a reply to a different thread, attaching a file to a comment) were all solved long ago. The beauty of separating the information (the comments) from the presentation (how the reader/poster wanted to see it displayed) was no better illustrated than with the wide variety of USENET readers that existed for a while.

    You’re right that Disqus threads (and many others on the web) are poorly done if you want to come back later. It tries to work around some of the limitations by doing things like putting notifications on the page that new comments are present, but that’s almost useless if there are more than one screen of comments (e.g. Drum’s recent 600+ Disqus comments on his “Berkeley censorship – who decides?” post). And scrolling through 595 comments to see 5 new ones is stupid (it should automatically hide stuff that you’ve already seen and make it easy you to see the earlier part of the subthread if you want).

    Maybe Alain’s right that WP is fine for comment sections with the right plugins. I dunno. But it’s all academic. ;-)

    My $0.02.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  48. 48.

    JWR

    @Yarrow:

    Use the “back” button if you want to see what comment someone is replying to.

    Not to mention that you can easily go back to where you were by using the “forward” button. Easy peasy. Also, and just speaking for myself, I don’t find this problematic at all. So that’s my vote against nested comments.

  51. 51.

    Yarrow

    @Another Scott: I don’t know how well that would work here since we don’t have logins. And in the old USENET days people didn’t go from laptop to tablet to phone to other phone to other tablet, etc., etc. I don’t see how tracking that sort of thing would work from device to device except via login, which we don’t have. I don’t think John wants to manage logins and I kind of like it the way it is.

  52. 52.

    Alain the site fixer

    @Yarrow: yes, no logins. And you’re right- with so many devices we’d probably need logins to get it working cross-device. Technically cookies could work but that’s all theory. In short, it won’t be happening anytime soon given the current rules and standards.

  54. 54.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Major Major Major Major: It’s odd. We have this conversation every time there is talk of a system upgrade. It’s JC’s blog and he wants it this way. The fact that I agree with him is incidental.

  55. 55.

    Chet Murthy

    @Omnes Omnibus: I have to agree with Cole (and hence, Alain). One of the BIG reasons I like reading comments at BJ (maybe that’s a BAD thing?) is linear comments. It’s easy to come back and know where to start reading — you just note the comment# before you refresh the page, and typically the page comes back to that comment#, so you don’t even have to scroll-down. At LGM, the other place I comment, it’s threaded-comments, and it’s -always- difficutl to figure out what’s new. So I comment less-often, and wait to read a comment-thread until it’s pretty large, and has more-or-less stopped growing. I guess it wouldn’t hurt if there were a way to switch back-and-forth, but oh lordy, please not threaded as the only way to read!

  56. 56.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Omnes Omnibus: Well, considering it first came up in this particular conversation as a joke…

    But yeah, I mean, somebody’s always going to suggest it in earnest if somebody else doesn’t troll about it. If there was a blog with threaded comments asking for suggestions, I might suggest switching to non-threaded comments even if there weren’t a tradition of joking about it.

    ETA: If somebody paid me I would whip up a website that lets you view and post BJ with threaded comments. It’s fairly straightforward.

    ETAA: Or a browser extension.

  57. 57.

    Aaron

    three requests:
    allow posting of pics and gifs in comments
    persistant comment identities so you can have an actual profiles. Maybe “disqus”?
    voting posts up and down, so we can see the most important ones and somehow have threads of conversations that we can follow.

  58. 58.

    Mike J

    Can we just set it up so that every night our computers dial up the Juicer nearest us and we pass new messages back and forth. All these problems were solved decades ago with fidonet.

  59. 59.

    Garbo

    I can also strongly recommend ResistBot which converts your texts into a formatted letter that is faxed to the congresscritters of your choice. Text Resist to 504-09 to get started.

  60. 60.

    Another Scott

    @Aaron: See my link called “here” in #11 – Disqus is right out to paraphrase The Boss.

    Google indexes the place, so it’s pretty easy to do a search for things here if you use the right form of the search.

    E.g. ‘site:balloon-juice.com “Ted and Helen”‘ will bring up links mentioning a certain infamous poster.

    We had talked about users being able to post images a while ago. It’s apparently easy to abuse and potentially break things here (e.g. someone posting a 5000 pixel wide image intentionally or accidentally). Dunno if that’s why they aren’t here yet or not.

    HTH.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  61. 61.

    Alain the site fixer

    @Mike J: I SOO miss Fidonet! At age 15 I ran my own BBS after years of using others’. It was an amazing technology for 1987!

  62. 62.

    Alain the site fixer

    While I’m here commenting, let me mention that I did consider an auto-replace function to replace all mentions of Trump with something else, ditto for Wilmer, etc.

    But that’s crazy Newspeak thinking, really – having the audacity to automatically rewrite words into other words to please those who have the power/access, publishing to prevailing public (BJ community) opinion, etc. I mean in this case the idea is at-first-glance-acceptable, but the principle so violated is sacrosanct to myself, and. I think, John.

    “Much better to have commenters and frontpagers use the words they wish themselves,” I say.

  64. 64.

    Another Scott

    @Alain the site fixer: My kingdom for a “Preview” function. The 5 minute edit window isn’t really a substitute – especially when the post ends up in the dungeon. A Preview that flags verboten words would be nice too.

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  65. 65.

    Alain the site fixer

    @Another Scott: hey now, that’s an incredible, very, very good idea!

    I’ll research and figure out a possible implementation.

    I really don’t know if it can be done easily, but let me see what I can learn and then we can go from there. And by we, I mean, likely, myself and @Major Major Major Major, as he well knows.

    I must now go finish heating leftovers so wife and I can sit down on the couch together for a nice movie.

  66. 66.

    Alain the site fixer

    @Another Scott: but get yourself a treat tonight – you earned it! Great idea; if you lived under my roof, I’d make you something yummy and sugary and fattening to reward you, so please take a virtual single-serving plum-mango-raspberry tart with thanks.

    ETA: and I will check this post tomorrow, so feel free to comment overnight. I will look and take into account all comments on this post.

  67. 67.

    gbear

    Just wanted to jump in with my favorite site for getting Legislator information.

    Vote Smart

    Just enter a name and you get a ton of contact info in the ‘Bio’ folder. I cut-and-pasted a contact list for a dozen or so legislators that I mostly use for postcards and phone calls. My feeling is that a note in the mail is more effective than email.

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