Over the last five years numerous people have written for Savage Minds, either as full time members of our blog, or as guest or occasional bloggers. As a result it has sometimes been hard to figure out just who, exactly, is Savage Minds? We’ve liked to keep things ambiguous in the hopes that former bloggers would come back and write for us again, but this summer we had a better idea: Why not turn our roster of former bloggers into an ad hoc “advisory board,” like what you’d find on an academic journal, to which we could turn for advice, recommendation for new bloggers, etc.? We asked our former guest bloggers and alumni, and many of them happily signed up. As a result, if you now click on the Savage Minds “authors” page, you will see a list of our esteemed advisory board members. Thanks to all of them for participating in this experiment!
You will also see that where we used to have separate pages for “guest bloggers” and “Savage Minds alumni” we’ve now simply added a list of all Savage Minds authors to the foot of the page. This is a full list of everyone who has posted at least one blog post on Savage Minds. Clicking their name will bring up an archive page for their posts. (You can do the same by clicking on the name of the author when reading an individual blog post.) In some cases we post on behalf of a contributor who does not wish to create their own account. These “occasional contributions” have their own archive page.
Finally, in response to your feedback on how we handle comments, we’ve added a “report comment” button on every comment. This will allow users to flag particularly offensive comments directly, alerting the Savage Minds moderators of the violation. Hopefully this will help us more proactively respond to some of the worst abuses.
As always, if you don’t see all the changes immediately, be patient. We use some page-caching technology to ease our server load and sometimes it takes a while for site-changes to appear.
UPDATE: Initial tests show that the comment reporting feature is working. However, it does not properly let you know that the report has been sent successfully. We are looking into that, but our technical skills are limited, so please be assured that it is working even though it doesn’t display a confirmation message.