As Humanities Commons’ fifth birthday approaches (more on that in a few weeks) we’re doing a bit of housekeeping to keep everything running smoothly. We’ll continue to communicate as we move forward, but wanted to let you know about two recent changes.

Website Cleanup

There are currently just over 1,500 websites on Humanities Commons. Among them are a few hundred that were created but never used. This includes both individual and group sites. We’ve gone through and found sites that have no posts or pages that are over one year old, and we’re contacting administrators to find out if they are still planning to use them. If not, we’ll delete them for you, and if you do we’re happy to point you to guides and other information on how to move forward. Any websites with content, new or several years old, will remain active on the platform. We don’t want to remove content, just clean up sites that may never be used. We’re planning on doing a site inventory once a year to keep the platform running smoothly.

Closing Comments on Posts after Two Weeks

We’ve noticed an uptick on spammers trying to exploit the comments on old posts to increase search engine rankings. These posts sometimes contain links to malware and other unwanted content. To continue to fight this spam we’ve automatically set post comments to close after two weeks. If you run a website on the Commons you can change this setting on your site by going to the admin panel and clicking on Settings/Discussion on the left-hand side. You’ll find the setting under  “Other Comment Settings.”

If you have any questions or would like further information feel free to leave a comment here or email us at hello[at]hcommons.org.