Wings Over Scotland

Okay. We’re done warming up.

Time to go for it properly.

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As you can probably imagine, with over 140,000 readers a month we get quite a lot of emails. Unfortunately the contact form plugin we’ve used until now to avoid being swamped in spam (which is what tends to happen if you just give out your direct email address) is a bit rubbish, and results in an inbox that looks like this:

Having 95% of your email listed as being from “Contact” or “Contact form” is, we can reveal, a major pain in the backside when it comes to keeping track of conversations.

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Sorry, readers. Something horrible happened today. No cause for alarm, but you might have to be on your own tomorrow. Normal service will be resumed as soon as etc.

…until it’s gone. Wings Over Scotland is normally protected by a brilliant spam filter called Akismet, which blocks the constant flood of fake comments that assails every website on the internet. Akismet has filtered out 1,496,404 of these attempts to sell you counterfeit fashion, hardcore porn sites and attempts to steal your bank details since we started, in amongst the 120,297 real comments we’ve published in that time.

Last night it suffered a temporary outage, with the result that the four or five “pending” comments we usually wake up to in the morning – ones Akismet thinks are spam but isn’t 100% certain about, and so puts in a queue for us to look at manually – have been replaced today by 1,877 (and rising – an hour ago it was just over 1,000).

Here’s what this means for you.

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We’ve only just realised that it’s our official second birthday today. (The technical one, ie when the site went live as a test with some old imported content, was last Friday, but we forgot to mark it, and today in 2011 is the day we published the first-ever post written specifically for Wings Over Scotland.)

In those two years we’ve published 1,680 posts including this one, and the thick end of a million words – 941,426 to be exact – by over 40 different authors. It’s a lot of stuff to take in, especially if you’re fairly new here. (Which you quite probably are, as nearly half of our 100,000+ readers have arrived in the last three months.)

So to mark the anniversary, we thought we’d see if we could distil most of what we’ve written in those 24 months down to just two iron rules, one for each year – in effect, producing a sort of user’s guide to the Scottish and UK media on the subject of Scottish politics, and in particular Scottish independence.

We think we’ve managed it.

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This is why you’ve had no posts today.

Meet Skye, Islay, Rona, Shuna, Cara and Jura. They’ll be staying.

The data from our second Panelbase poll will be released tomorrow in six instalments, starting at 8am and then arriving at two-hourly intervals. (That’s what we’ve instructed WordPress to do anyway. We have no idea what its attitude towards Greenwich Mean Time is, so it could actually be 8am, 7am or 9am. But whichever one it turns out to be, the other ones will be two hours afterwards.)

We’re telling you this now because we’re having the DAY OFF. It’s our BIRTHDAY.

This, chums, is what the Daily Telegraph thinks of as “a house”:

The article appears to go on to suggest that house prices in England would rocket as a result of a Yes vote, while those in Scotland would plummet. We’re not quite sure that the average Scottish voter will reach the same conclusion from that assertion that the Telegraph would want them to.

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Sometime this month, Wings Over Scotland is likely to pass 100,000 approved comments (over and above the tens of thousands that get caught by our built-in anti-spam filter, the splendid and ever-vigilant Akismet). Which is amazingly great, because the site’s comments match quantity with quality, but it’s also an awfully large volume to have to keep an eye on.

Don’t panic – we’re not about to start pre-moderating them or anything. We’re extremely proud of our (almost unique in Scottish politics) uncensored debate. But in order to stop comment-wrangling from taking up an increasingly disproportionate amount of our time and let us focus on writing articles, we’ve instituted a few official guidelines (and one absolutely cast-iron rule). We’ve added them to the “About” page.

One thing we noticed over the last week or so was the near-total lack of campaigning on the streets of Scotland’s cities and towns, from either side. So if you were inspired by the rally and fancy making a more active contribution, why not pop to your local printers, make a few copies of this excellent wee leaflet, and get busy?

You can get 1,000 A6 copies printed for £22 here (5,000 for £40). Hand ’em out or just leave them in strategic locations (with permission, of course). Let’s get the word out.

Right-click the image to get the full PDF version, ready for printing.

*bites tongue*

*bites tongue again, harder*

Right. Our chosen meeting place, it turns out, is “off-map” and likely to be frowned on by police, given its immediate proximity to the “VIP area” that we didn’t know existed until 20 minutes ago. And even though it’s probably too late now for many of the people who were planning on joining our group to see this post, it’ll likely cause fractionally less chaos to post it than to not.

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So it’s getting close to that time. How do we feel about gathering the team here?

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