I’ve noticed that recently the full article text is included in the first post of each Article Comments thread. Previously it was only a summary. I was wondering if @ace is willing to share what lead to this change philosophically or technically or both? Not a big deal, just curious 
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In what context? I haven’t seen this.
I’ve looked:
- In an “Article Comments” page on TidBITS Talk (e.g. https://talk.tidbits.com/t/does-limiting-an-iphone-s-battery-charging-to-80-increase-lifespan/29005), which begins with whatever the author of the comments page wrote as an article summary.
- In an article’s comments RSS feed, (e.g. https://tidbits.com/2024/09/25/does-limiting-an-iphones-battery-charging-to-80-increase-lifespan/feed/), which always seems to be empty
- On the Article’s page (e.g. https://tidbits.com/2024/09/25/does-limiting-an-iphones-battery-charging-to-80-increase-lifespan/). The first comment is the first comment, not a copy of the article.
Can you share a link to what you’re seeing?
Try this one and compare to the charging to 80% article you linked to.
As @jzw, I’m curious what prompted the change and why only some articles appear to be going this new route (latest articles only?).
A couple of other recent articles show the same.
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I see. I assume @ace chose to do this. I don’t think it’s a technical issue. At least I don’t see how it could be, since TidBITS and Talk are different apps on different servers.
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I noticed it as well, and like it!
Diane
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Yes, sorry, I should have said something. It’s an option in the WordPress/Discourse integration. Previously, we had just been doing very short excerpts as the first post, but after a recent conversation with @jcenters, I decided to try posting the full text as the first post.
The reason, and he’s still going to look into this for me, is that changes in the way Google ranks page utility have radically increased traffic to TidBITS Talk, to the extent that it’s either similar to or significantly more than the main TidBITS site. These Google Analytics charts show TidBITS Talk on the left and TidBITS on the right for all of 2024. As you can see, TidBITS Talk is going up and TidBITS is going down and they’re relatively comparable.
According to Google Analytics, TidBITS Talk received about 268K pageviews from June through September, whereas Discourse’s internal stats suggest the number should be 440K. (Discourse didn’t have earlier data for reasons.) I don’t really know who to believe, but regardless, it’s clear that TidBITS Talk is becoming more and more important from the perspective of bringing more people to TidBITS.
We don’t earn any money from pageviews, but I do want our content to help as many people as possible, so I figured it was worth seeing if putting the full text of articles in TidBITS Talk improved their Google juice even more.
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Makes sense, and thanks for the explanation. This is the kind of insider info I was hoping for!
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@ace, the one disadvantage I’ve seen to the inclusion of full articles in the first post of a thread is when I click through from the article on the main TidBITS site to come to the comments here. I do this by clicking on the name of the first commenter:
This takes me through to the top of the comment thread here on TidBITS Talk. In the past this was no issue – I could quickly scroll past the first post, which was a single paragraph summary, and start reading the comments on the article. But now the whole article is contained in the first post, it takes quite a bit of scrolling to get to the comments.
I know, this is the smallest of small problems. But I was wondering if it’s possible to have the links go to the second post in the thread instead of the top of the thread. Currently, the href for all the author names on the tidbits.com article page go to the thread URL. In the above example this is:
https://talk.tidbits.com/t/thunderbolt-5-only-necessary-for-the-most-demanding-uses/29347
If it could instead link to the following, it would take us to the second post which is the first comment in the thread:
https://talk.tidbits.com/t/thunderbolt-5-only-necessary-for-the-most-demanding-uses/29347/2
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I also noticed that (due to the differences in the CSS templates between TidBITS and Talk) they two don’t look the same. For example, this week’s articles on Thunderbolt 5 has a table that formats differently.
From the TidBITS page:
But from the Talk page:
I won’t say which is “right” or “wrong”, since both are clearly readable and understandable, but they are clearly different.
That all having been said, I do prefer seeing the full text at the start of the Talk thread, because it’s easier to quote article text when posting comments.
Yes, no argument from me, I think having the full text in the thread is an improvement. I don’t think the different styles is an issue as they each fit the style of their respective websites (and as Adam said, many readers never see tidbits.com as they start from a link to TidBITS Talk).