#oneaday Day 434: The battle to re-enable comments

A while back, I disabled comments for old posts, because I was getting a few unpleasant people trawling through past posts and being kind of a dick. Now that appears to mostly be a thing of the past, I have, on multiple occasions, attempted to re-enable comments on old posts, only to find myself running into a brick wall.

I tried turning off the "automatically close comments on posts older than [x] days" setting in the WordPress dashboard. I tried turning off the same setting in the Bluehost plugin (which, while I'm no longer using Bluehost, was still active on my site to do stuff like caching and auto-updates). I tried batch processing all my old posts in the WordPress Dashboard and checking "Allow Comments" on them. I tried doing posts individually. Nothing seemed to work — posts older than a month were getting their comments closed, even though I had, seemingly, turned off everything that should be doing that.

I spent a bit of time tinkering in the Dashboard earlier today in an attempt to try and fix this once and for all. And the only thing I found that worked was to set the "close comments older than [x] days" figure in WordPress' settings to 999999 days, or just shy of 2,740 years. A smaller figure would have probably worked, but I wanted to use one that I wouldn't have to update in my lifetime. I will note that changing this setting is what worked despite the "close comments older than [x] days" checkbox being unticked. So apparently something, somewhere, had got its knickers in a twist and was still closing comments after 28 days, even though all the relevant settings on the back end had been set firmly to "no, please do not do that".

So there you go. If you want to go back through my old posts and leave comments on them, you can now do that. The only thing I would say about that is to please remember that this blog has been up and running in one form or another (though not always at this URL) for 17 years, and I am not the same person now that I was when I first started it, nor am I the same person I might have been at the time you take offence at something I wrote at some point in the last 17 years. Times change, attitudes change, opinions change. I don't think I have changed all that much in my core beliefs — I've always been left-leaning and sex-positive with little patience for bullying — but my willingness to wade into the mud of the Internet and actually fight is seriously diminished these days. Today, I just want a quiet life, to be perfectly honest.

If you have wanted to leave a comment on something older than the last 28 days and have found yourself unable to do so — sorry! I have been trying to fix the problem and it wasn't until the above last-ditch "I wonder if this works" attempt actually worked that I've been able to sort it out good and proper!

So yeah. Come say hello in the comments if you feel like it. Or not. I'll be here either way.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 420: Scratch pad

Well, I did what I said yesterday and set up a new site purely for creative writing shenanigans. You can find it at https://scratchpad.moegamer.net — there's nothing there yet, but feel free to bookmark or subscribe or whatever if you feel like it. I'm making no promises as to the regularity with which I'll post over there, but it is there for me to use when I feel like it. Long-term, I might like to try and make some sort of "commitment" to doing some creative writing on a regular basis, but as with anything, it's going to be a case of establishing the habit first of all before you can actually really make it into a full-on habit.

I've been thinking about what I might want to write over there. I think I might start with some short stories rather than attempting to do anything too complicated or ambitious right away. While complicated, ambitious stories are always a delight to get started on, it's easy to get bogged down in the middle section and never get around to finishing them. One thing I found with my "NaNoWriMo But Not Really (Especially Now They're AI Weirdoes)" posts on this site was that it was those middle parts which were the most challenging. You may have a strong opening (ooer missus) and a solid finale in mind, but it's getting from one to the other that is often the challenging bit. Particularly when you're trying to ensure you meet a word (or, in the case of those projects, post) count.

So short stories would seem to be a sensible thing to start with. I can perhaps use them to explore or establish some characters, and those characters can perhaps grow into something I want to do more ambitious things with. Perhaps a collection of short stories focused on a particular character or group of characters is a solid foundation for a longer work? Or perhaps what begins as unconnected short stories can end up telling a complete narrative? I don't know. It's been quite a long time since I've done this, so my mind is, frankly, fairly awash with possibilities at the moment.

One thing I am going to take care of on the new site is to ensure that things are categorised nicely. I'm envisioning a page where you can just browse through short stories, then anything which ends up being more ambitious can, of course, have its own page also so anyone who cares to do such a thing can read from the beginning to the end without interruption. And it goes without saying that this site will remain ad-free for the foreseeable future — given that I don't have any ads on my most successful site, MoeGamer, I really don't think having them on a creative scratch pad is really going to achieve anything.

And, of course, the site will remain proudly AI-free. Not a single bit of generative AI will go anywhere near that page, and absolutely definitely not for text generation. The whole point of the site is for me to indulge in some unadulterated creativity for the first time in quite a while, so dicking around with AI kind of defeats the object there, doesn't it? Also there's plenty of quite convincing evidence right now that using ChatGPT turns you into a dribbling cunt that is totally incapable of thinking for itself, so there's that, also.

Anyway, yeah. That's the announcement, I guess. Now to figure out something to write over there!

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#oneaday Day 304: Web maintenance at the worst times

I found it very hard to get out of bed this morning. The reason for this is simple: I stayed up until 2AM doing maintenance activities on this site and MoeGamer that could have almost certainly waited until a more sociable hour, but once I'd started, I wanted to see them through.

Y'see, both my sites have gone on a bit of a journey. They were both originally hosted on WordPress.com, with this blog being on a free account and MoeGamer being on a "Premium" paid tier. I was starting to reach the limits of what I could do with the Premium account in particular — most notably with regard to media storage space — and thus I moved MoeGamer to a self-hosted WordPress.org installation on a Bluehost hosting account.

Before anyone jumps in to decry Bluehost as being shit: believe me, I know. That is the reason neither of my sites are hosted with Bluehost at this point. But we'll come back to that.

As anyone who has ever tried to migrate a large site from WordPress.com to WordPress.org will tell you, the supposedly simple and straightforward migration process is anything but. What is supposed to happen is that you hit "Export" on your WordPress.com site, which spits out your site's contents as XML files, then you hit "Import" on your WordPress.org site, wherever you've hosted it, and it will recreate your site. Posts, pages and comments will go right back in, and the import process is supposed to look for any media you posted and automatically go and retrieve it from your old site, then transfer it to your new one.

Notice how I emphasise "supposed to". Because in the multiple times I have done this over the years, not once has it ever worked how it is, apparently, supposed to. Not only that, but the documentation on WordPress' own site refers to features and options that do not actually exist. Take these instructions for exporting your Media Library, for example. By following these instructions, even if the "automatic" process described above didn't work, you should be able to just tell WordPress.com to export all your media files into a big ol' .zip file, then import them all in one go to your WordPress.org installation.

Just one problem: the options they tell you to click on do not exist. Maybe they once existed and now do not, but right now — and for multiple years at this point, since I've done this several times with different sites — they do not exist, making them completely useless as instructions.

There are plugins that are supposed to help with this sort of thing. You can't install plugins on a WordPress.com site unless you're subscribed to the obscenely expensive "Business" plan, but you can install plugins on WordPress.org. Except you then run into the minefield of whether or not the plugins in question actually do what you think they're supposed to do, or if they're just some dodgy, shady thing trying to get you to sign up to their "Pro" account because the one vaguely useful option they have is paywalled.

And this is to say nothing of most web servers' tendency to crash if you throw too much data at them in one go. I have several thousand posts on both here and MoeGamer, and attempting to import them all at once would crash the import process every time. I ended up having to go a hundred at a time, which took a very long time, I can tell you, particularly as it would still crash on occasion. And amid all that, if it wasn't already clear, it didn't automatically import my old media and transfer it across to the new site; instead, it just left links to the old media and then… didn't do anything else.

So what I ended up with was two sites that were full of images that were hotlinked from an account I wasn't paying for any more, and which I wanted to close down. And it took me until last night to figure out some possible solutions.

For the record, I used two distinct plugins. Firstly, I used the Auto Upload Images plugin, which actually does do what the media import process is supposed to do: it looks for externally hosted images, then it imports them to your media library and updates the <img> tags to point to your new media library copies. The one downside I found with this plugin is that rather than importing the old images under the same date structure as the old site, it imports them all "today". This is down to a limitation with how WordPress handles files, I think, so no big deal — but it did cause an issue.

On both my sites, a lot of older images had automatically been set to allow people to click on them to see the full size versions. The links were now pointing at the old version of the image, while the <img> tags were showing the new versions. Not only that, but the mismatch in dates meant that some of these clickable links were just completely broken.

To resolve this, I took something of a nuclear option: I used the Broken Link Checker plugin to scan my site for all its links, searched those links for anything that was pointing at the old wordpress.com site and then just batch "unlinked" them. That means that the new images would be safely in place, the broken links would be removed and everything from thereon should, in theory, be hunky-dory.

There are a few things that have broken along the way, like any Gallery posts I hosted have lost all their images and I don't see any means of fixing that aside from doing them all manually, plus there's been the usual "link rot" of old copyright-infringing YouTube videos no longer being available online. Plus any audio media seems to have gone walkies, too, but again, no big deal, really; I don't think anyone expects a website that has been around for nearly 20 years to suffer from no link rot whatsoever.

But anyway. I got rather involved in this process last night, starting around 11pm. I knew, looking at the clock, that I shouldn't start doing something like this so late in the evening. But then I did, and hyperfixation kicked in, and I kept going until everything was, so far as I can tell, sorted. I mean, my galleries and audio bits are still broken, but I can live with that. What I didn't really want to live with was several thousand broken image links that led nowhere. And I think I've fixed that issue.

If you happen to notice anything wrong with any old posts you find yourself reading, do let me know and I'll see if it's possible to fix them. In some cases, that may be possible; in others, less so. As I say, it's part and parcel of a site being live for this long, even if it has moved hosting and domain names multiple times in its lifespan. But hopefully it's going to stick around right here for quite some time, so I wanted to fix as many of the annoying little issues as possible. So here we are!

I hope the three or four of you who actually read this appreciate the work I put in!

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#oneaday Day 191: Moving online home again?

Annoyingly, it's looking like I'm going to have to uproot this here site and MoeGamer yet again, because my current host has increased the annual price of hosting by literally about four times over the supposedly "introductory" offer I wasn't aware that I was on. Reading around, it seems this company — Bluehost, 'cause I'm going to name and shame — is notorious for doing this, and I am just the latest of many people to fall foul of it. So don't use Bluehost.

Thankfully, I have seen a few recommendations floating around, and I think the one I'm probably going to go with is Zume. This is a UK-based hosting service that comes particularly recommended by the nerds on r/webhosting, plus they supposedly do a free complete migration and you can pay monthly — though of course, as always, it works out more expensive to do that than paying for a year or two up front. Honestly, I think I'd rather have a predictable £10 a month than £X every year or two, though, as that's much easier to budget for.

I'm probably going to start the process for this going tomorrow. Supposedly they'll get the whole shebang done same-day, but it remains to be seen if that actually is the case. This is, I guess, then, your official warning that there may be some unexpected downtime both here and on MoeGamer at some point in the next couple of days.

I wish I didn't have to do this, as moving "online home" is almost as frustrating as having to move your real home. Granted, there's a lot less putting things in boxes and cleaning, but there's still a laundry list of things you need to remember to do — and inevitably an equally as long list of things that you have already forgotten that you need to do. But, well, I'm not paying nearly £300 for a year's web hosting, because that is daylight fucking robbery. £10 a month? Fine. I am 100% okay with that.

Here's hoping that 1) Zume sticks around for the long term, 2) Zume doesn't get eaten by a big corpo that jacks up prices to an absurd degree and 3) the whole migration process goes smoothly. Fingers crossed, and further updates as events warrant.

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#oneaday Day 126: What is WordPress doing?

You may recall a little while back I had an issue with my WordPress.com blog, the original incarnation of this site. The site's "automated anti-spam" system had flagged my blog and taken it offline. I hasten to add that there is, of course, no spam or any other sort of inappropriate, objectionable or illegal content either on the original form of this site or this present incarnation. It was a mistake on their part, brought about by WordPress.com's parent company Automattic increasingly relying on "AI" (spit) for more and more of their functionality.

This was the first time I'd had an issue with WordPress.com since joining in 2006. But it was serious enough that it made me move my site over to a self-hosted WordPress.org installation, which is what you're reading right now.

For those unfamiliar with the distinction, WordPress.com is a free-with-paid-options blogging service where you can set up a blog or other website quickly and easily. Its free offering has gradually gotten worse over the years, now placing a rather obtrusive "Made with WordPress" banner on new sites created, but for the most part, I've always been satisfied with it for my purposes, particularly because, having been a user for so long, I had been "grandfathered" in to not having things like that banner ad.

WordPress.org, meanwhile, is an open-source project that maintains WordPress itself, which is a content management system and blogging platform you can install on any website. The main distinction is that WordPress.com is a service provided to you, while WordPress.org is both a piece of Web-based software and the community surrounding it. And one of the key differences is that while with WordPress.com, you're stuck with preset configurations unless you pay through the nose for their extortionate "Business" plan, with WordPress.org you can tinker with and customise the core software as you see fit, either by fiddling with the code yourself, or by installing plugins.

I was dismayed to see how much "AI" rot had infested WordPress.com, and it made me no longer want to associate with the platform. Now, it seems, there is trouble with WordPress.org too, as reported by the excellent tech blog 404 Media.

I have not followed this whole saga, but it seems Automattic is having a bit of a spat with a company called "WP Engine", which is a service that hosts websites built using WordPress. Apparently Automattic's CEO Matt Mullenweg branded WP Engine a "cancer to WordPress" and complained about them and their investors not contributing "sufficiently" to the open source project, and that WP Engine's use of the "WP" brand might confuse users into thinking it is an official WordPress thing.

I can sort of see his point on that last thing — though WP Engine maintains their usage is covered by fair use — but this whole thing appears to escalated beyond reasonable proportion at this point. WP Engine sent Automattic a cease and desist letter telling Mullenweg to stop having a tantrum, and Mullenweg responded with what he calls a "scorched Earth nuclear approach", sending his own cease and desist letter to WP Engine.

It didn't stop there. Mullenweg banned WP Engine from accessing resources on WordPress.org, including, among other things, the plugin directory and the ability to automatically update plugins and themes. Not only that, he has raised a significant number of eyebrows by adding a peculiar checkbox to the WordPress.org login page, asking users to confirm that they are "not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise".

This, of course, has had people asking what the consequences are for not ticking that box. And it seems a few individuals who have been longtime contributors to the WordPress.org project have been banned from the community simply for asking "what the hell, bro?", to paraphrase.

This is concerning. Not being able to access the WordPress.org community doesn't preclude anyone from building their site using the WordPress.org software, but it is a problem for those who have been helping to maintain and update it. On top of that, some contributors are quite reasonably concerned about potential legal repercussions if they do not tick the box, believing Mullenweg to be just that petty.

My simple question is… well, it's "what the hell, bro?"

WordPress, in both its .com and .org incarnations, powers a significant chunk of the modern Web. And while blogs have somewhat fallen out of favour since the rise of social media, there are still thriving communities of both WordPress.com and WordPress.org bloggers regularly posting — and who, more to the point, likely have a significant body of work hosted on some form of WordPress derivative at this point, which it will be a pain to move somewhere else.

It's depressing to see both incarnations of WordPress fall foul of enshittification and CEO arrogance. Because that's what this is. Whether it's the AI garbage being rammed into WordPress.com or whatever the fuck Mullenweg thinks he's doing with WordPress.org right now, the WordPress name is being dragged through the mud right now. And that's unfortunate because, AI garbage aside, WordPress is still a great product.

I hope this situation is resolved sooner rather than later. And in the meantime, if you're still blogging on WordPress.com, you might want to pop into your Site Settings menu and tick this checkbox just so your blog isn't scraped for AI shite.

This site is staying where it is and in the incarnation it presently has for the moment. I really hope I don't have to migrate again, and that I can go back to recommending WordPress like I always used to. Right now, though, Automattic is a company I would advise most folks to avoid like the plague.

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#oneaday Day 111: New URL, who dis

Hello! And welcome to the all-new incarnation of I'm Not Doctor Who, which can now be found at https://imnotdoctorwho.moegamer.net instead of its previous WordPress.com incarnation. (The old site is still there for archival/linking purposes, but all new updates will now be over here.)

Why did I do this? I think you know why, if you're a regular follower, anyway. After Automattic's dumbass automated "anti-spam" systems mistakenly flagged my blog and simply nuked it (albeit temporarily) rather than attempting to contact me in any way, I became somewhat concerned as to the "security" of the memories I have stored on this here blog. 17+ years of them, to be exact, and it would be a real pisser to lose them. Because while this blog is and always has been an unfocused mess with no real purpose other than to be a scratch pad for me to write whatever I feel like, it's mine, and having some idiotic undoubtedly "AI" (ugh) powered bot potentially take it away from me at a moment's notice without even telling me made me feel like it was probably time I took better ownership of it.

So here we are, on a shiny new subdomain of moegamer.net, my gaming website. I think most of the important stuff has transferred over now, though not without fighting WordPress' terrible import function and the fact that no website on the Internet, including WordPress themselves, actually hosts up-to-date information on how to perform the export and import function correctly. Consequently, there may be a few broken images here and there, so please feel free to let me know if you spot any and I'll attempt to fix them.

The incident earlier in the week highlighted how important this site is to me, though. Not only has it played host to two sets of daily ramblings in the form of the #oneaday blogs, it also includes several creative writing projects of varying degrees of finishedness, photographs, memories of dearly departed pets, and all manner of other things. It has also helped me survive several incredibly tough periods of my life.

The more I thought about it while the site was down the other day, the angrier I felt that it had just been snatched from me without warning — and, I reiterate, without me having done anything wrong. This was entirely on WordPress' parent company Automattic, who are going in hard on "AI" bullshit at the moment. And so while this site is still running on the WordPress software, it is no longer running on Automattic's platform, meaning I am not beholden to the whims of their automated shit machines going voonkarankachank and nuking any blogs they feel like without having the courtesy to contact the authors first.

So that's that. Welcome, I guess. And let's see where things go from here!

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#oneaday Day 55: Do Not Turn AI On Without Asking Me

Partway through writing the previous post, I was surprised to see a weird yellow underline appear under one of the words I'd used. I hovered over it and was horrified to see the symbol no-one wants to see pop up, completely unasked for and unbidden. It seems that Automattic, makers of WordPress and specifically the JetPack plugin that handles things like social sharing and search engine optimisation, have been sneaking in an "AI Assistant" without anyone asking for it.

And I really haven't asked for it, because I saw it pop up in the sidebar a few months back and immediately turned it off in the options. See:

And yet turning it off in there has not made it go away. Because this shit is still here:

I do not want this. I did not ask for this. I specifically turned this off and it's still fucking there. And you can guarantee with that "Available Requests" counter at the bottom, they're going to try and sell me a subscription plan to get more "credits" for their stupid pointless pile of crap feature.

I am not the only one who feels this way. And the fact that comments are closed on WordPress' blog announcing this garbage feature speaks volumes.

A recent study published by the Journal of Hospitality Marketing and Management suggests that the terms "AI" or "artificial intelligence" are proving a turnoff to users.

"When AI is mentioned, it tends to lower emotional trust," said the lead author Mesut Cicek. "We found emotional trust plays a critical role in how consumers perceive AI-powered products."

The study is mostly around purchasing decisions rather than just generally using services, but the point stands: people see "AI" in something these days, and unless they're an insufferable Silicon Valley-poisoned techbro, they are immediately switched off by it. Social network Bluesky recently announced that they were partnering with social analytics and scheduling platform Buffer, and the response was universally negative not because Buffer is a particularly bad service on the whole — I've used it in the past — but because they, like so many other tech companies right now, have shoehorned in an "AI Assistant" when no-one wanted one.

No-one wants this. Stop trying to make AI happen. It's not going to happen.

I've long recommended WordPress as a great platform for folks who want to build a regularly updated website without getting too deep into the nitty gritty of web dev. But forcing AI on people may cause me to rethink that somewhat.

I wouldn't mind it being there if it was opt-in, and one could ignore it. But it is not. It is turned on by default. And you can't make it completely go away, only stop it being quite as annoying.

I cannot wait for this AI "gold rush" to be over. It is infesting everything even vaguely tech-related right now, including services that, as noted, I would previously have recommended without any reservations whatsoever.

Fuck off, AI. As a large language model, you are ill-equipped to receive my fist up your arsehole, but you're going to anyway.

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#oneaday Day 45: Happy Wordiversary

Apparently, according to my notifications anyway, today is the 16th anniversary of me signing up on WordPress.com. Indeed, looking back at my very first post it does seem that I started blogging on here on July 22, 2008.

Back in those days, I posted sporadically. I wasn't really sure what to do with a blog at the time, I just felt like I wanted one. It actually wasn't the first blog I'd had, either, although it's the only one that's survived this long.

I did, at one point, post an anonymous "Tales from the Staffroom" blog on BlogSpot that recounted my experiences as a classroom teacher, but there appears to be no trace of that left on the current Internet. There is an archive of it from as recently as 2023, but Google appears to have gone on a "Blogger purge" at some point in the last year, so the address no longer works on the current Web. This is a shame, but at least archive.org caught it before it disappeared.

At the time I started this blog, I was still working at the Apple Store as a "Creative" — that is to say, I was one of the people whose job it was to provide training sessions for Mac users on the use of creative software. Technically our job was supposed to be confined to lessons on Apple software only, but we inevitably found ourselves having to deal with customers using all manner of weird and wonderful pieces of software for their very specific needs.

This was partly our own fault — one guy on the Creative team was a Photoshop expert, so him happily covering that set the expectation with customers that we should all be able to cover Photoshop, even though several of us had specialisms in other areas — but also it just felt a bit mean to have someone just turn up, ask for help (which, nine times out of ten, was pretty simple, given that most folks who signed up for the "One to One" programme were new Mac users and often elderly) and tell them "no".

I enjoyed that job for quite a while. I had a nice group of friends and I was good at it. The pay was… all right, considering it was a retail position, and the freebies and staff discounts were excellent. Unfortunately it ended badly when the management of the store inexplicably went into something of a decline and started being unnecessarily harsh on the folks working for them. I ended up losing my job after standing up for a colleague of mine who absolutely was unfairly dismissed, but given that both management and the folks above them closed ranks, he was never going to get fair treatment. And, as it turned out, I didn't, either. Thankfully, I resigned before they could fire me, but it left an extremely bitter taste in my mouth with regards to all things Apple.

Anyway, I don't want to dwell on that too much because that's probably a whole other story I can tell another day. That was the context in which I was writing those first posts, though: I was, for a time, genuinely quite happy and satisfied with the way things were going. My life perhaps wasn't proceeding in the direction I had initially intended — after a nervous breakdown, I decided that classroom teaching really wasn't for me — but it was proceeding, at least. And having a blog was a nice breezy way to ponder on all sorts of things without any sort of real "pressure". I can't even remember if I'd joined Facebook or Twitter in 2008; I think I probably had, but social media certainly wasn't the all-encompassing force of shittiness that it is today back then.

It's interesting to look back and see things that no longer exist, such as PMOG, the Passively Multiplayer Online Game, where you earned experience points and other RPG-style benefits for simply browsing the Web. And it's also gratifying to see that so far as my tastes are concerned, some things never change.

You are, of course, always welcome to browse back into the archives via the dropdown in the sidebar. (I'm not sure where it is on mobile, probably at the bottom?) I'm not the same person I was back then — but every experience I've had, everything I've written about, has helped make me who I am today, for better or worse.

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2286: Disappointment

This post is a response to WordPress' "Daily Post" writing prompt for today.

My immediate reaction to the word "disappointment" when seeing today's writing prompt was… well, disappointment in The Daily Post's prompts of late.

Longtime readers may recall my occasional use of The Daily Post's writing prompts and the fact that they led to some interesting explorations of topics I might not normally explore on this blog. My default go-to topics for writing about are video games, games journalism and mental health issues, but the prompts from The Daily Post gave me a nudge to consider other topics now and again, whether they be nostalgic, hypothetical or just plain weird.

Lately, though, the prompts on the site have just been single words, and these don't inspire me nearly as much as the questions or phrases that used to make up The Daily Post's bank of writing prompts. I'm trying to pin down exactly why the change to this style of prompt fills me with such disappointment, and I think it's because it provides the opportunity for too broad a range of things to write about; single-word prompts are too flexible.

Let me explain what I mean. When I decide to make use of a writing prompt for a day's post, I like it being in the form of a question or an exam-style "Phrase. Discuss." prompt because it provides some sort of direction to the writing. Creativity is, to me, at its most interesting when you work within some sort of constraint, because you then have to not only use your creativity to produce the work itself, but you also have to use your creativity to perhaps bend the rules of the constraint in question, too. A single word doesn't constrain me at all; I can still pretty much write about anything tangentially related to, say, "disappointment", and I've technically fulfilled the brief. That, to me, isn't a helpful writing prompt. That, to me, makes me feel like I should have just started writing any old thing off the top of my head rather than looking for a prompt.

I'm aware that my experiences and feelings about this aren't going to be the same as everyone else's, and that there are doubtless plenty of bloggers out there who relish the chance to tackle the challenge of a single-word prompt and make it interesting. But for me, I always found The Daily Post much more enjoyable when it provided much clearer briefs and prompts on what to write about — and much more interesting to see how other people interpreted these briefs, too.

Hopefully we'll see a return to form for The Daily Post at some point in the near future. If not, well, I may have to contemplate setting up something of my own. I can't be the only one feeling disappointment in this way!

2212: The Stat Connection

"Go to your Stats page and check your top 3-5 posts. Why do you think they’ve been successful? Find the connection between them, and write about it."

Daily Post, February 9, 2016

All right. Let's have a look, then. Since we're not that far into 2016 and WordPress doesn't appear to have an "all time" function to search top posts, I'll provide the top five posts (excluding the homepage, which makes up the majority of pageviews but doesn't tell me much) for both 2016 so far and 2015. In other words, these are posts that people saw the title of (probably on social media or via a search engine) and directly clicked through to, rather than simply checking my front page each day.

Here's 2016 so far:

And here's 2015:

All right. So let's get analysing.

Since I write about a wide variety of topics on this blog — regular readers will know that it's my personal outlet for venting about whatever is on my mind on any given day rather than any attempt to provide a coherent editorial experience — it's perhaps not surprising that not all of the entries in these two lists have something in common, but there are a few common themes along the way.

How to Do Stuff

Let's look at 2016, first. Both How to Win at Omega Quintet and Helping your Squad in Xenoblade X were written in 2015 (indicated by them not having the orange bar next to them), yet have remained consistently popular since I wrote them. The reason for this is that they are instructional content: guides for video games. Instructions or guides are consistent traffic magnets, regardless of the subject matter of your site, because one of the most common things people search the Internet for is how to do something. Video games sites often use guide content for current popular games to attract visitors to their site and guarantee a baseline of ad revenue, then cross their fingers that readers will click through to other, less "baity" content. It doesn't always work like that, of course, which is why we've seen a rise in deliberately provocative "clickbait" content across the board, not just in games journalism.

Anyway. The reason that my guide content for both Omega Quintet and Xenoblade X proved popular is that these were both games that had a specific audience, but neither of them were "big" enough for a commercial site to want to devote time and column inches to them. In other words, those searching for help when playing Omega Quintet and/or Xenoblade X would be out of luck when searching the big video games sites, but a cursory Google search would doubtless throw up my posts here fairly early on — indeed, at the time of writing, my post on Omega Quintet appears sixth in my (admittedly personalised) Google search results, embarrassingly with a typo in the preview text which I have now corrected:

It's for this reason that a couple of my other previous posts have proven popular over time: my post on How to Play Pocket Academy, for example, detailing the baffling and frankly illogical mechanics of Kairosoft's mobile-based school sim, rode high in my rankings for quite some time. I tell you: if you want traffic, write posts that tell people how to do stuff, and preferably how to do stuff that mainstream sites haven't covered.

The Power of Sharing

My most popular posts are always several orders of magnitude more popular than their nearest rivals, with perhaps the most impressive example being 2015's An Open Letter to Paul Glass, Slimming World Consultant, Upper Shirley. This post was pretty far from my more regular subject matter on popular media, particularly video games, and yet it was my most popular individual post for 2015. Why? Because it had the absolute shit shared out of it.

Paul Glass was the consultant at our local Slimming World group when I first joined, and his enthusiasm and belief in the programme was and is a big part of why I've stuck with it and had so much success over the course of the last year — I've lost six stone in a year, hopefully with more still to come off. When he revealed that he would be leaving the group to spend more time with his family in far-off climes, I felt it important to express my feelings about what he had helped me accomplish in such a way that I could be clearly understood. I'm shy and socially anxious by nature, and at the time I wrote this I'm not sure how confident I would have felt saying all those words in person, but writing them down on paper is no big deal: I can "fire and forget" that way.

Something told me that I should probably share this post a little wider than just my Twitter followers, though, and so I decided to make one of my extremely irregular visits to Facebook to post a link to the letter on the Facebook group for the Slimming World group in question. That one simple action caused that one single post to absolutely explode in popularity, as it was shared by group members, Paul himself, and subsequently by other people I'd never met involved with Slimming World in various capacities, either as group members or staff.

You never can quite tell what the next big viral sensation is going to be, but there is one thing that all my popular posts do tend to have in common:

The Passion of the Post

It is, I feel, no coincidence that my most widely shared, most popular posts are those in which I feel most passionate about the things that I am writing about. I am a person who, I feel, can express their passion for something pretty clearly through my writing. And indeed, due to the aforementioned shyness and social anxiety mentioned above, I find writing to be the easiest means through which I can express that passion to an audience that can — hopefully — appreciate what I'm saying, or at least respect it.

2015's most popular posts were all about passion, from my letter to Paul to Perhaps We Should Stop Insulting Fans of Japanese Games. Four out of the five posts above were about video games — four out of the five posts were pretty much about the same thing, in fact, which was critics' regular dismissive and unfair treatment of both Japanese game developers and the fans of the games they make — but these posts all resonated deeply both with myself and with the circle of friends I've cultivated on social media, most of whom share the same interests as me.

Consequently, much as my letter to Paul got shared far and wide, so too did The Joyless Wankers of the Games Press (actually written the year before in response to an absolutely atrocious review of Fairy Fencer F on my former stomping grounds of USgamer), Some Thoughts for Critics (a response to Jim Sterling's dreadful and ill-informed review of Senran Kagura 2), Hi Games Journalism, It's Time We Had Another Chat (a response to Mike Diver's equally dreadful and ill-informed review of Senran Kagura 2, a game which is a ton of fun but which proved to be a whipping boy for self-described "progressive" types on the grounds of the female characters' big jiggly breasts) and the aforementioned Perhaps We Should Stop Insulting Fans of Japanese Games (a response to an extraordinarily narrow-minded editorial on USgamer by my former editor Jeremy Parish, and almost certainly the reason he has me blocked on Twitter). I saw these posts get shared and reshared, not only on Twitter, but also on Facebook and Reddit, the latter of which I don't really use myself.

The things I had written had clearly got the strength of my feelings across, and other people felt like they could relate to them in some way — either agreeing or disagreeing — and this caused them to explode in popularity, at least in terms of numbers. The same, too, can be said for 2016's Why It Would Be A Mistake to Not Localise Valkyrie Drive Bhikkuni, an impassioned plea for the progressive loudmouths not to stop Senran Kagura creator Kenichiro Takaki's new game making it over to Western shores.

Bovril?

I'll be honest, I have no idea why a post from 2013 about beef-and-yeast-extract black sticky substance Bovril is my third most popular post this year so far, but oddly enough this post has been consistently popular: it finished 2015 in sixth place, just after my various rants at the games journalism industry and also ranked sixth in 2014, but only managed 19th place in its original year of publication.

It's not even a particularly exciting post: it simply describes what Bovril is and how I feel about it. It doesn't even appear on the front page of Google results for Bovril. But I guess it meant something to someone somewhere. Perhaps not many people write about Bovril on the Internet, and my post offered a safe space for Bovril fans to convene and share in silent contemplation of salty beef drinks. Or perhaps it's just one of those things that can't quite be explained.

So what can we learn from this?

There are a few things you can probably see my most popular posts have in common. To my eye, these things are:

A clear, conversational title that makes it clear what the post is about — i.e. a simple subject line rather than a "title" that tries to be clever or funny
Passion for the subject — clear emotion, either positive or negative, is infectious and relatable
Scope for sharing — be it a topic that a lot of people feel strongly about, or something that is written in such a way that presents a strong argument in favour of or against something
Complete honesty — even at the expense of a few "bridges" if necessary
Instructions on how to do stuff — particularly if nowhere else has published instructions on how to do that stuff

Not all of my most popular posts have all of the above elements — although I do make a specific effort to apply the "complete honesty" element to everything I write — but these are, by far, the most common factors that all of my most popular posts have between them.

I hope that's proved as enlightening for you as it has for me: it's certainly given me some food for thought with regard to what to write about going forward from here, so I'd say both as a writing exercise and an analytical investigation, this post has been a great success.

Thanks, Daily Post!