I’ve given News Sniffer a huge overhaul – the culmination of over a year’s work (on and off part time). The biggest change is that we’re no longer checking for censored comments on Have Your Say. This was an intensive system to run and maintain and I just can’t dedicate the time and resources to it any more. The archive is currently removed but will be restored soon.

News Sniffer’s focus is now on monitoring changes to news articles on the web.

The whole news article version checking system has been overhauled making it much more efficient and easier to maintain. This makes it much easier to add features, particularly additional parsers for other news websites (we’re currently only watching the BBC). Watch this space over the coming months.

The check scheduling system is now much more reliable too, allowing more regular checks of more articles with less resources.

Due to a recent change at the BBC, Revisionista can no longer properly detect changes in articles. To fix this, I’ve brought forward plans for a new version of Revisionista. This should be up and running within a couple of weeks.

The new version will fix these problems, but also make it much easier to fix if things change again in the future. It will be much easier to add additional news sources too – so stay tuned for a great new Revisionista.

In the mean time, sorry for the inconvenience.

UPDATE: The BBC seem to have made more changes and now Revisionista is working again, thanks BBC!

The Register used News Sniffer’s Revisionista to track the changes of a BBC article on the ID cards.

The report’s revision history, documented by News Sniffer, takes us on an impressive Odyssey from “Smith to unveil airport ID scheme”, through “Shops may take ID Card biometrics” to the final sales-pitch version, cunningly deniabled with quote marks.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/14/bbc_stories_cant_wait/

Both Revisionista and Watch Your Mouth have not been updating correctly for about a week due. Working again now. Sorry for the outage.

I’ve just added the BBC health feed to Revisionista so we’ll start monitoring more health related articles. So far, the only health articles included were from the World or UK feeds.

Revisionista now explicitly excludes BBC sport articles from it’s monitoring and I’ve deleted any from the last couple of months. This is because these articles generate a vast number of revisions mostly due to score updates during games. This is wasting News Sniffer resources that could be better spent monitoring other articles.

News Sniffer was down for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon whilst I upgraded the software that runs it. This fixes a few display bugs and more importantly patches up another problem where bbc comments were being misclassed as censored. The misclassification was due to a mistake when handling british summer time, so it’s only been prevalent since the end of March. We double checked all censored comment from the last few months and removed any misclassified ones.

Due to the downtime whilst we cleaned and reindexed the database, some news articles and bbc comments were not added to the database so will not be tracked. So, if you’re looking for a particular news article published yesterday afternoon, it’s likely that it is missing. Apologies for the inconvenience.

The biggest new feature is vastly improved search system.

It works like most search engines, so just type keywords in and you get results. You can be a bit more advanced too though. Say you want to find all censored bbc comments by the author ‘John Smith’. Do a search for:

author:"john smith"

Read the rest of this entry »

Apologies but due to a VPN problem, News Sniffer has not been monitoring news articles or Have Your Say forums for the last 2 days. All working again now though. I’ll set up some alerting system to prevent this happening again.

I’ve just added the BBC UK Politics section to Revisionista, so articles from it will be monitored for changes from now on.

The NHS Blog Doctor blog used Revisionista to expose a bit of a “cover-up” on a BBC News article.

Basically, NHS Blog Doctor criticised a story on babies with milk allergies published by the BBC. They even made a formal written complaint. The article was then changed and readers started accusing NHS Blog Doctor of misrepresenting the BBC. They never received a reply from the BBC about their complaint. Not even an acknowledgement.

They used News Sniffer to show the article had been changed. Go read the whole thing.

The Revisionista diff of the particular change is here.