If you are viewing this, then you should give yourself a pat on your back because you are now viewing the new and improved Eventing Nation. The design team chinchillas went through painstaking efforts to ensure that this new version looks almost exactly the same as the Eventing Nation that you know and love. However, I assure you that in terms of ability to handle traffic, functionality, convenience for the writers, stability, ability to grow moving forward, and comment spam protection we have taken a huge step forward that will allow us to focus purely on bringing you all of your eventing news and ridiculousness. Movable Type served our purposes in 2009 as a tiny rambling blog with one post per day, but after several site crashes, a completely overloaded spam filter, and countless frustrations for the EN Team including inexplicably lost news and notes posts at 1am, we have made the leap to WordPress. The transition took weeks longer than I hoped. Thursday will go down in EN lore as a day of infamy, but the worst part of the transition is behind us. We will be unleashing a few new features on EN over the coming weeks and I’m excited to spend more of my time back writing for EN rather than dealing with a website migration.
The major difference with this new version of EN is the integration of a new commenting system. Eventing Nation is hit with approximately one attempted spam comment a second which lead to too many spam comments getting through the spam filter. When we strengthened the spam filter, too many good comments got caught. We have moved to the Disqus comment platform which gives us three commenting options.
1) Comment as a guest. You must provide a username and email. The first time you submit a comment in this way the comment will be held for moderation. Once the comment ninja chinchillas approve the comment you will be able to post comments without moderation in the future. As always, the ninja chinchillas are highly discerning and only intelligent, productive, and positive comments will be approved. A good rule of thumb is don’t leave a comment if you wouldn’t say it to someone’s face.
2) You can register a commenting profile with Disqus
3) You can login and comment using your Facebook id. We strongly suggest using this option both because it is the easiest way to post a comment and because it is the best option for preventing spam comments.
Please take a second to leave a comment just to make sure the system works for you.
Every reader, computer, and web browser configuration is different, so please please please let us know in the comment section of this post or via email if you are having any issues whatsoever. If we don’t hear about a problem we can’t fix it. We are still sorting out a few kinks with our @eventingnation.com email accounts so please report any issues you are having with the site to our secret email account [email protected]. Please send all hate mail related to the conversion to [email protected].
I couldn’t write a post like this without thanking the many members of the EN Team, and that extends out to each and every contributor to Eventing Nation from commenters to the tipster who sent us that video of Nat VC dancing to our guest bloggers and particularly the writers who work so hard each and every day to contribute to Eventing Nation. Last, but very not least, I want to extend our many thanks to our sponsors as well–Cavalor, Devoucoux, Dubarry, Flair, Horse Quencher, John Nunn’s family of companies including Nunn Finer and Tack of the Day, Omega Alpha, Pennfield, Point Two, SmartPak, Success Equestrian, Tipperary, and World Equestrian Brands. Our sponsors pay the bills that keep the EN compound lit and the Chinchillas warm through the long cold winter and in turn the Chinchillas keep us all sane, or thereabouts.
Go eventing.
