Notices by Adam S. Smith (adamstuartsmith@sauropods.win)

I'm starting to feel obliged to post something on my plesiosaur blog about the many fake Zarafasaura skulls that have started to appear on Ebay in recent months. I mean, they're as crude as hell and completely unconvincing, despite the real teeth and random bone fragments that have been smushed in, but I still hope nobody unsuspecting gets fooled by them. #FossilFriday #plesiosaurs #plesiosaur #skull #ebay #fossils #fake #paleontology

@pfefferle No problem - a well deserved holiday - sorry to bug you!

I'll follow your suggestion. 👍

@pfefferle Any thoughts on this or how to avoid the duplicate posts? It's happening on two of my blogs. Maybe I've missed or mis-clicked a setting. Thanks.

Hi @pfefferle I noticed author comments are now being duplicated as blog-profile comments on my blogs (see pic and other examples in the link). Only the duplicated comments are being federated. Is this intended behaviour (I'm set up as Blog-profile)?

https://dinotoyblog.com/placerias-deluxe-prehistoric-collection-by-collecta/#comments

@pfefferle My Wordpress sites have the ActivityPub plugin installed. I created a poll (https://dinotoyblog.com/forum/index.php?topic=11511) to ask visitors to one blog if they know what "Reply on the Fediverse" means on certain comments, and whether it would put them off replying.

Not a huge sample so far but the results are still interesting and, I suspect, indicative.

@monkeyben @pfefferle They don't necessarily *want* to reply on social media at all - they just want to reply to the blog comment on the blog. Most visitors don't understand what it means for the blog, or their comments, to be federated. The "Reply on the Fediverse" button clearly puts some people off. I haven't ascertained what the objection is yet.

@pfefferle I can't find the Extra Fields section on my blogs, how do I add them?

#Introduction

Curator of Natural Sciences at the Nottingham Natural History Museum, Wollaton Hall, UK (#NottNatHist)

Palaeontologist focussing on Mesozoic marine reptiles, especially plesiosaurs

Children's author: The Plesiosaur's Neck and The Tyrannosaur's Feathers

Founder of DinoToyBlog.com & AnimalToyForum.com

#Curator #Nottingham #Museum #WollatonHall #Palaeontologist #Author #ThePlesiosaursNeck #Dinosaur #DinoToyBlog #Animal #AnimalToyBlog

@pfefferle I think that's what used to happen, yes, but I can see how that wasn't ideal. Still, it was better than not being able to comment at all under the 'enable blog' mode. There are pros and cons to the 'enable authors' and 'enable blog' modes.

I suppose there's no simple way to have both a blog profile (for all posts) *and* separate user profiles (for comments only).

Thanks for looking into it!

@pfefferle Thanks. Yes, so if I changed it to multi-user mode I can post as my individual blog user? I have 23 users, but most visitors want to follow the blog as a whole, not 23 separate users. So I've adopted single user mode. So I think I'm stuck unless there's a way to get the best of both worlds - federate posts as the blog, but comments as users...

I can seemingly no longer reply to federated comments on my Wordpress sites from my blog accounts. I'm forced to "reply on the Fediverse" and then jump through some hoops to post a reply from a different account. It seems like a step backwards, I really liked the two-way federation of comments. Now it only seems to go one-way. Am I missing something? Is there a way to make the "reply on the Fediverse" optional, so I (if not visitors) can choose to reply on my blog as my blog?

@pfefferle

@dinotoyblog Testing threaded comment.

@dinotoyblog @pfefferle It works! But it's one-way only, right? If I reply to a federated reply on the Wordpress site itself (using the Wordpress account), that reply is not federated?

@dinotoyblog Haolonggood are becoming prolific!

Someone tell the spiders in my garden Halloween was a month ago.

#Spiderwebs

@dinotoyblog

A question for @pfefferle about the Activitypub WP plugin. I want to add some default hashtags to every post to make them discoverable on the Fediverse. Such hashtags would be too broad to be used as native tags, they are only useful externally. In my case, hashtags like #DinoToyBlog & #dinosaurs

I manually added a hashtag to the "Post Content" area after the shortcode (see image). But, as you can see above, it doesn't become a hashtag on Mastodon.

Is there a way to do this?

@dinotoyblog I've edited the original post on the blog to add alt text to the image. That change comes through to the Fediverse, which is fantastic!

The only notable difference now between manually sharing posts and using the #Wordpress #ActivityPub plugin, is the ability to add a broad #DinoToyBlog hashtag. A keyword like that would be useless on the actual blog (e.g. as a tag or category) but is kinda crucial on the Fediverse. @pfefferle are there any plans for such a shortcode in the future?