What's happened to the more tag?
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staff-zinnia
Thanks for reporting back but I’m afraid you are missing the point. The Reader may very well be functioning as designed but the point is that I don’t want my posts read against the sterile white background of your Reader viewing pane, I want MY choice of background used, i.e. my blog site as I have set it out.
The ‘link to blog’ icon may well be showing on the main reader page but the fact is that most visitors will automatically click on the post title or header picture, as that is the obvious method to open the full post and not even know what the link icon is for! Hence the likelihood is that most visitors won’t then follow through into the main blog sites but will restrict their visit to clicking into the Reader, reading a post in the boring white viewing pane, clicking back to the Reader and so on and so forth. This means that any older posts will be forgotten, links on blog rolls won’t be seen and traffic/click numbers will be drastically reduced, especially in blogs which historically have had a large number of follow through views.
Saying that the reader is functioning as designed does not alter the fact that WP has made a deliberate decision to override the wishes of its’ bloggers and in doing so, shows a woeful lack of respect and consideration for an individuals design choices.
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It does seem to be an attempt to keep people on the Reader and discourage them from clicking through to people’s blogs. The question is why? They say it’s to ‘improve the experience for readers’ but readers are, usually, also bloggers – bloggers who presumably would like readers to visit their actual blogs.
Just speculating – maybe it has something to do with so many more people now accessing online content on their phones. Perhaps keeping them on the Reader gives them a more streamlined experience – less jumping back and forth between sites. It creates a kind of silo or bubble, and discourages clicking out to other sites.
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Currently for my review blog, I do interviews with featured guests and spend quite a bit of time making custom HTML tags to display the interview as if it were a mobile conversation. When people see the full post in the Reader pane it completely destroys this formatting and makes it look terrible. Absolutely terrible.
Less tech savvy readers won’t know that this is the fault of the reader, and wont blame Automattic, instead they will think I, Green Embers, was the person who did such a crappy presentation, and make them less inclined to read the entire post. This is actually hurting my blog and makes for a poor reader experience.
Please honor the current settings as they were designed. Or less preferred, but willing to live with, honor the HTML markup tags (or CSS) in the Reader pane.
We work really hard on our blog presentations and to have the uniqueness of our blogs be so dismissed is quite hurtful. Almost like you don’t love us any more. :(
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I’m also unhappy with this. Should I inform the others who are dissatisfied with this development to come voice their discontent in here or should we just create a petition?
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@rescatoor You can try, but WordPress seem to have decided this is the way they want it to work. Perhaps if more people complained they would have to take notice. Many bloggers probably haven’t even noticed the change.
If you get others on board, maybe it would be a good idea to start a new thread (and link to this discussion), because this thread has a misleading title. The problem has nothing to do with the more tag.
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