I have been involved in beta for about a week now and I think some of the improvements are good and some not so good.

The things I like about beta newsvine...

  1.)  the look is nice

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  2.)  articles look better when published

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  3.)  the advertisements are outside of your article so they don't shoot your pictures or paragraphing down to the bottom of the page leaving a big white space in between

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  4.)  IMO, nations have been greatly improved - much easier to see and remove membership, can find out who the admins are - all in one place.  The ability to comment-clip to any one of your nations and comment under another nation once it is clipped to that nation.

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  5.)  Comment-clipping an article to your nation (read below the one major issue I have with this)

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  6.)  I like the fact that no one knows when I am signed on to NV and when the last time was that I was signed on. You can still see how many articles, seeds, comments a viner has contributed and how long they have been a member of NV.

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  7.)  I like the fact that you can toggle the look of your articles and seeds - tiles, listing with just the title, or listing with a small part of the article.

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  8.)  There is also a pretty cool section above the advertisements that lists some of the previous articles you have seeded or written.

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  9.)  In my column, but not in my nation, I can easily feature articles.

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10.)  The italic feature does not bold everything.

Things I miss in beta NV...

1.)   Blockquote - this was a good way to separate a lot of words.  I'm not sure how we are supposed to acknowledge someone else's words in beta without blockquote unless we go back to the beginning when we didn't know how to do it and use quotes and italics.

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2.)   No comments showing.  There were times when friends would find articles that I did not find.  I figure it depends on when you sign on to NV as to what you will see.

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3.)  The header pictures of nations.  It doesn't appear that we can put pictures in our nation headers.  I don't know code, but I read an article as to how to do it, so I made a header picture for my nation.  It seems I can only use it in articles in beta.

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4.)  A place to put articles I find that don't belong in any of my nations, but I want to have so I can easily find them.  Example:  I set up a private room called My Newsvine Help in NV Classic where I clipped articles that discussed the rules of Newsvine and I was the only member.  I could never find them using search.  Also, trying to clip them to my private clippings was a waste as it took forever to find those articles.

Things I dislike about beta Newsvine...

1.)  Tracking Comments.  When I use the tracker in beta on an article I have commented in, it takes me to the very last comment made in an article instead of the first new comment in the article.  If there are a lot of comments, unless you read every comment again, you may not find the new comments if they are somewhere in the middle of the comment section.  Not all comments are made at the end of an article.  Maybe once everyone is in the new system that will change.

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2.)  Cannot feature articles in a nation.

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3.)  It seems I can only hit reply once when commenting in a nation and then I have to start a new conversation even if it is in response to the comment above.

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4.)  When previewing an article in beta whether it is in the process of being written or already published, it looks like draft and not what you would actually see when published.

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5.)  Xhtml is hit or miss -mostly miss.

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6.)  The same glitches are still there when trying to use bullets or numbering.

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6.)  I do not agree that the people in your nations are your friends list.  There are people in those nations I have never seen or have never talked to.  I do not necessarily have to be friends or even like someone who is in my nation, but if they are basically rational in thought, give a decent point of view, and add to the discussions and-or nation, I would invite those people to join my nation.

7.)  The other side of the Comment-Clip Feature.  The biggest issue I have with beta is the comment-clip feature. Every time I make a comment in one of my nations, the article will automatically clip itself to that nation. I can see where this can be a good thing, but there is a side to it that is just awful. 

               It's one thing to have to manually clip an article, it's something else when it is automatic and you have no control over where it is clipped. In the present NV, if someone wants to derail an article, they go in and comment. Those comments, though, are mixed in with other comments that may pertain to the article itself. They are not in one place.

               There are those of us who may have personality conflicts and for the most part respect each others differences and still allow each other to have our space in Newsvine without sabotaging each other's work. What I am talking about here, though, are those who are just out to cause trouble.

               Under the new system, anyone can comment-clip an article to one of their nations and have a field day with it and all of those comments are then under one nation tab and are not interspersed with the comments that are the meat of the article. It might be nice to have those comments outside of the meat of the article, but, IMO, they will have more impact because of the continous continuity of those comments all in that one nation tab without our ability to refute any comments made since we are not a member of that nation. 

                The trough was developed, I believe, to cut down on trolls and malicious users by not giving them an equal standing with nations. If they set up their own nation, they then have equal standing and if we are not a member of that nation, other than doing what I state below, we will be sitting in our separate, see-through walled rooms watching the destruction of our work.

               It is not fair that we should have to unpublish an article because a particular group wanted to trash an article or an author. We can't delete individual nation tabs, so that means either we delete those comments (some know how to circumvent the CoH), close comments and leave those awful ones there, or unpublish the article.              

               I don't know what the solution is, but I feel this should really be looked into by the developers of this software to somehow redesign the comment-clip feature.  I would not want to see out and out battles between nations.  Newsvine could end up being a war zone and that would be just awful.

          To end my beta NV saga, I feel it has its pros and cons.  To lose the parts that made Newsvine feel like home is disheartening. One of the reasons why I left other news sites was because of the cold and callous way some of the participants treated each other, the squeezing out of participants who have a different opinion than the popular one.  I hope with the changes the new Newsvine brings, we do not see this same sort of thing.