Less than a week ago, I asked you what EPL Talk could do to improve. Your feedback is vital to the continued success of this blog, so I appreciate you taking time out of your busy day to send in your suggestions.Here are the responses to the suggestions made by the readers
:@LemmusLemmus and Django: EPL Talk is definitely very lenient about allowing comments. Interestingly, I delete on average about 5-10 a day before readers even see them — those are pretty vile. I also remove approximately 40-50 posts a day that are spam. But I do let quite a few through that other sites may consider vulgar. I prefer to allow open communication, but it’s something I’ll take a closer look at and will be more apt to delete the abusive comments in the future.@LemmusLemmus, Damir, Chad Looker and Sanjay: The most common suggestion from you, the readers, was to allow the complete post to be displayed on the homepage instead of the “Read More –>” link. Let me explain why I added the “Read More –>” link in the first place. There were two reasons for adding it. One, the homepage is more than 274k in size. The less content that’s displayed on the homepage means that the page will load more quickly especially for readers with slower connection speeds. Second, sometimes the articles that are written are pretty verbose, so some readers may click away before they even get to the stories below a lengthy article.As you may have noticed, I’ve returned to allowing the full post to be displayed on the homepage instead of the truncated version. Let’s see how that goes.@Todd:
Yep, I totally agree. Rather than focusing on gossip, scandal, controversy or transfer rumors, I prefer to provide interesting news stories that provide an interesting twist regarding the world of football that we love.@DaveM: I fixed the White Hart Lane 404 error message. Thanks for pointing that out. If you come across any others, please let me know at thegaffer[at]epltalk[dot]com. Regarding the links pointing to the wrong articles, I’ve figured out why it’s doing that, so it should be fixed now. Again, if you come across something that doesn’t work, just let me know and I’ll fix it asap.Dave, no common gateway is planned for the network of EPL Talk sites, but I’ll improve the navigation/links so it serves as a reminder. The sister sites are already getting updated quite often now, so feel free to visit them at championsleaguetalk.com, championshiptalk.com
, laligatalk.com, serieatalk.com, soccerondish.com
, worldcupbuzz.com and bundesligatalk.com.Dave, we plan on covering the transfer talk during the summer pretty closely. We’ll try and stay away from the rumors as much as possible and report the facts.@Alex and Damir:
If bloggers such as Michael has an opinion to share, more power to him. You’re not always going to agree with what he says (or what I say, or other bloggers say), but please be conscientious enough to read the article with an open mind.@Damir: You can always respond to people’s comments by adding an additional comment. In the meantime, I’m looking for some other solutions to comments to add more functionality. I’ll be testing those out within the next week or so.Damir, the only way for the forum to become more popular is for people like you and others to make it popular. As for the recent addition of new advertising sponsors, EPL Talk is a business that needs to pay the bills to keep the lights on. I’ve tried to include the advertising in such a way where it doesn’t detract from the overall experience.One of the differences about EPL Talk is that we try to be as objective as possible. Rather than turn this into a Chelsea or Liverpool loving blog, we try to stay open and comment on topics as we see it without any prejudice. There’s no Premier League club I support, so if you perceive an Arsenal bias, it might be because they deserve the criticism. If the Gunners do something well, we’ll point it out (as we’ve done on numerous occasions in the past).@Wanderer Abroad: For a professional football player who makes more money in 1-2 weeks than most of us do in an entire year, I still stand by my criticism of Nani’s performance for Man United against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. I don’t think I’ve seen a Man United player ever put in such a dire performance in a red shirt before. I stand by my initial comment that his actions that day were disgraceful. If you get a chance to go back and watch the game, pay particular attention to his performance that day. It was completely dreadful.@Chad Looker:
EPL Talk tries to write articles on topics or story angles you won’t find elsewhere. Sometimes, though, articles are written on a timely topic such as a match that just finished. While it’s not unique, it acts as a way for people to respond pretty quickly after a match has finished. Most of the times our articles are pretty fresh, and we’ll continue to provide that service in the future.@Utd Fan: Coverage about the Coca-Cola Championship can be found on our sister site, Championship Talk.@Kat Kid:
Lonnie Smetana has been doing a great job at updating Champions League Talk more often. Check it out when you get a chance for some great European coverage and analysis.Kat Kid, as for your recommendation about more tactical analysis and discussion, I’m all for it but it’s easier said than done. I’m no tactical genius but if you or someone you know is interested in writing about the topic for EPL Talk, let me know at thegaffer[at]epltalk[dot]com.As for Euro 2008 coverage, we’ll have daily coverage between now and the end of the tournament. Not sure about Olympic coverage, but we’ll see as we get closer to the big event this summer. No plans to write about Celtic unless we start SPL Talk, but I don’t see that happening anytime in the near future.@Django: One of the differentiators about EPL Talk is that it is one of the few sources you can go to for quality information about soccer coverage on cable and satellite. But in the future, we plan on writing more about that on our sister site SoccerOnDish.com rather than on EPL Talk.Lastly, in case you didn’t notice, EPL Talk launched its redesign this past Saturday. The design is similar to the previous one except that this takes up more width on the screen real estate as well as featuring more columns. Other features have been added such as more comments being displayed near the top of the home page (ten latest comments).Thanks again everyone for your valuable feedback.