Live blog helpers needed
The F1 Fanatic live blogs during race weekends continue to grow. During the Italian Grand Prix 334 people joined in and contributed almost 2,500 comments - and this was during the race alone, there were even more in the practice and qualifying sessions.
With an exciting end to the season in prospect and the F1 Fanatic live blogs appearing on a growing number of websites, those figures are going to get bigger.
The live blogs are run by myself plus a group of moderators. They all do an excellent job, but in order to keep the blogs running smoothly and to reduce the burden on the current moderators we could do with some extra help. Here’s some details on how you could get involved:
Moderators
We need moderators to ensure the comments received during the live blog are published as quickly as possible. Moderators need to be able to help out during qualifying and/or the race. The task simply involves monitoring comments as they come in, publishing those that are suitable (a one-click job), which tends to be the majority of comments.
The more moderators we have, the less each moderator has to do in total. At present each moderator covers between 15 and 30 minutes of action. Obviously I’d like to make the time comitment as small as possible, but to do that we need more moderators.
If this is something you are interested in doing, or want to enquire further, please contact me via the contact form or leave a comment below using an email address I can contact you by. (Email addresses arre never published or passed on to third parties). No commitment is required at this stage.
Commentators
Many users of the live blogs are people who are unable to watch or listen to the race live, or see timing screens. As a result, we get a lot of requests for basic information about the races.
In order to help anticipate those queries, I’m looking for some people to contribute by providing short, basic, factual commentary during qualifying and/or the race. This would cover things like:
- Which lap the race is on / how much time is left during a session
- Significant changes in gaps between cars
- Running order
I’m not looking for one person to do all these things - potentially we could have a number of commentator each doing a fairly small role.
In order to do this you would need access to F1.com’s live timing facility during the sessions.
If you’re really keen you could be both a commentator and a moderator, but that would probably be a lot to try to do at once!
Again if this is something you are interested in doing, or want to enquire further, please contact me via the contact form or leave a comment below using an email address I can contact you by. No commitment is required at this stage.
i can help if can, as either a mod or a commentator, but only during the practice sessions(FRI AND SAT)
I doubt that Bernie would like it, but could you not ’scrape’ the live text commentary that is provided alongside the live timings on the Official F1 site??
Interestingly you can normally tell that the guys doing the text commentary there are watching ITV. Thankfully they don’t pass on any Allen-isms!
Alex - I’ve no idea how to do that technically and it sounds like a lot of effort only to be served with a “cease and desist”!
Yeah but you’d have rattled Bernie’s cage!!
Comments on live timing are in java applet.
But there is open source ncurses client live-f1 which can be easy wrapped with AjaxTerm, WebTTY or some sort of ajax terminal emulator to display information from live-f1… and you will have live timing without java and registration (actually registration is needed but you need just one
)
Hey Keith- as I’m there most weekends, I wouldn’t mind doing moderation for both saturday and sunday. I also don’t mind doing the whole race and qualifying.
I can do moderation, as that’s pretty much what I currently do anyways, minus a few failed jabs at humor :). Full race is fine with me.
Grr, I mean commentary.
I’m not around at every race, and tend not to comment on (or sometimes even bother to watch) practice sessions, so I don’t think I can be too much help
I will say that I’m an avid supporter of the live blog and really miss it on those races I watch from home, without an internet connection. Anyone who is able to make the commitment and helps give us this valuable service gets my heartfelt thanks.
Sigh, I would love to help but because english is not my first language i think its better that i stay away from that kind of jobs. Who kows what kind of text i would let past as a moderator lol.
Btw. Thank you Keith for all work you have done for this site. Without your live blogs i would be complete lost what happens in race weekends. F1 coverige in australia is about 2 -3 hours late
and then its ofcourse ITV and my nervous can not take it anymore.
I’d love to help with commentary when I can
I’d love to be a commentator…if my schedule would permit it…
One thing thats irritate me most in live blog- TIME between moment when I send my comment and time when its shows- thats make them useless.
‘One thing thats irritate me most in live blog- TIME between moment when I send my comment and time when its shows- thats make them useless.’
We really try our best to go through all the new comments as quickly as we can and get them published as quickly as we can. But when everyone says something at the same time, for example, it makes it more difficult for us because there’s suddenly all these new comments we have to go through.
There’s also a bit of a difficulty on the part of the software to load comments once they’ve been approved for publication. I experience it too, and I know it’s the software because all my comments are automatically published as a moderator.
It can all add up to quite a bit of lag from time to time.
I hope you understand the situation and you can bear with us. I’m sure the folks at Coveritlive (who host our live blogs) will be able to resolve this issue in time.
Thanks to all those who’ve offered to help! I think I can speak for the moderators when I say it’s well and truly appreciated. See you all at the blogs!
Journeyer I know its not Your fault, the whole technical stuff, traffic and others. You doing grate job guys.
So big thanks to Keith, crew, and all F1Fanatics from whole world.
I see many people wanna help. That’s grate i like this whole place. But hey when weekend came and there’s no GP I just must complain for something
Cheers!
Na zdrowie!
I will help as a moderator or a commentator, but mainly during the race on Sundays.
Ricardo Yanez
Chile