Well, it sounds like this thread has made some kind of impact and things should continue to get better in the future, and that's all I was really hoping for
As I said, we take all serious suggestions and comments into consideration. We know we're still far from perfect on a number of fronts, but we're constantly working on improving the quality of the content and the site itself.
The Firefox spell checker isn't too bad I find (on Windows at least, Linux uses its own spell checkers) but most people either have it disabled or have it set to the wrong dictionary. I had it turned on throughout this thread because if I made a bunch of spelling mistakes in a thread about spelling mistakes, that would be a bit of a problem
It's not too bad, but it's dictionary is rather limited, and it has some other issues too...
I don't know about the RSS not receiving the edits. As I added in a small edit to my previous post, RSS doesn't actually contain the content, just a link to the main site. The aggregator (a word that Firefox's spell checker doesn't seem to have) either just links your browser to the main article page or fetches the article itself by going to that URI via HTTP, which is why if you use RSS in something like Thunderbird then most of your time is spent scrolling down past all the rubbish at the top of the page for every single article like a giant fudzilla logo and a banner ad - if you use a laptop you probably won't be able to see any of the article without scrolling down at all. Thunderbird doesn't even cache the web page, just the RSS so as long as the link doesn't change for an edit and the main page does receive the edit, Thunderbird should see it.
My point was that our RSS doesn't seem to refresh after a certain story is edited, even if the headline is changed. I'm not the best person to talk to when it comes to RSS, I don't use it.
I'm looking forward to the new design and RSS. Maybe even setting the HTTP response Content-Type header to "application/xhtml+xml" for browsers that support it (see HTTP request Accept header) so that the XHTML can actually be used rather than just being read in with an old HTML parser?
I can't go into detail at this moment, I'm not taking part in the redesign at this stage, It's being taken care of by the guys in Austria and Holland, so I don't want to promise anything we won't be able to deliver.
I'm not just struggling to think of bad things to say and so picking on your spelling and grammar. The quality of the content is something that you will never really be able to change much (at least not without hiring completely new staff and paying them a lot more, which would just ruin Fudzilla). You may not have all the facts and you have to make certain assumptions or interpretations sometimes and they may end up being wrong. For example, the recent NVIDIA 6 partner mistake. Because that will never change and all of your competitors face the same problems, you have to look for other areas to improve in.
I wasn't talking about your comments, but rather comments on other sites or discussion boards. Several sites have bashed citing the reasons I mentioned in my previous post, even publishing private correspondence and outright lying. We never respond to such attacks, we're not into that gutter crap... Anyway, these sites were more important and more popular than us, but now they're a lot smaller than us and not nearly as influential.
As for not getting every story right, well, we've published 11k+ so far. We got very, very few of them wrong. Take into account that we're dealing with a fast moving industry, sometimes major changes happen overnight, sometimes we just get bad info which checks out with several sources, but is proven to be flawed days or weeks later. It happens to all news organizations, not just tech sites. Anyway, juries convict innocent people and give them the death penalty, doctors amputate the wrong limb from time to time, and we get a frequency or price slightly off once in a thousand stories. I can sleep at night, like a baby.
I've tried emailing in the past but when I use the form on the main site (linked to by clicking on an article author's name) I usually get ignored. Besides, I wanted some kind of way of discussing the suggestion with others and getting it out there, some kind of "forum" if you will, for suggestions.
Email
info@fudzilla.com, or any of our authors directly. Better yet, contact me and I'll pass on your comment and fix any mistake you find, informing the author of it, so it wouldn't happen again. I'll send you my email, check your PM.
