I’m making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS. It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction with our first-ever spring cleaning challenge. Readers have spotted issues with roughly one-third of our 1,440 posts, which we’ll be resolving over the next few weeks.
We’ll be keeping the spring cleaning flags available another week or two, but I consider the contest portion complete. More than 40 different users submitted reports. Thanks to all of them.
In the end, our top ten spring cleaners caught 92% of the bugs:
| Name | Flagged Posts |
|---|---|
| Lauren Ocean | 104 |
| Tyler Leisher | 89 |
| Jared | 59 |
| Patrick Bowman | 45 |
| Peter | 43 |
| Ryan Stauffer | 39 |
| Matt | 34 |
| Chris | 15 |
| Mike | 10 |
| Shaun McKinnon | 8 |
Lauren Ocean and Tyler Leisher were the top two throughout, pulling far ahead of the pack. They’ll both get Related Schwag Prizes, with Lauren getting first pick.
What people found
The biggest issue readers encountered was link rot. Many utilities can detect when a link is dead, but it takes human eyes to recognize when a functional link is now pointing somewhere unintended, such as a general catch-all page. This often happens when a domain is sold, or the underlying CMS changes.
In most cases, we’ve simply removed the bad link. Other times, we’ve found a better source for what was there.
A thornier issue was what to do with posts that were out of date. A one-sentence post from 2008 explaining that I was too sick to picket doesn’t seem have a lot of value. No reader is likely to find that useful on its own. But as part of the larger context of all my posts about the WGA strike, it has some historical value. So I’ve kept it.
Some older posts had formatting issues arising from a long-ago change in character encoding. These are the happiest problems, as global search-and-replace can work wonders.
What’s next
Several users wanted the opportunity to rate articles, so that other readers might come across the “greatest hits.” That’s certainly something we’ll try.
It’s also clear that the site’s blogginess can make it harder to find answers to very basic questions, like “How long is a screenplay?” I have some ideas for addressing this Screenwriting 101 material in ways that won’t dumb down the site for normal readers.
Sincere thanks again to everyone who participated in helping polish the site.