The NBR’s website went through an upgrade just before the end of last year. It wasn’t smooth sailing for them, but the timing, when everyone was away at the beach, was smart.
However the site is still in a bit of a state of disrepair. Firstly – the news seems to have scrolled way down the page, and an annoying “upgrade…” message appears. I want it to go away forever.
The NBR is meant to be the business news authority in these parts, but the amount of whitespace and the pushed-down tab bar means it feels like someone’s blog.
The worst the introduction of a captcha system for checking that commenters are real. While that’s perhaps ok to stop the flow of spam to unlocked articles or from commenters who are not logged it, it’s completely unnecessary for locked, subscriber-only, articles, and for any time a reader is actually logged in.
I’ve added a few comments to NBR articles since the new system was bought in, and the Captcha system has failed on me just too many times. Perhaps I’m just lousy at reading the damn things, perhaps the NBR website people don’t have iPhones or test this bloody stuff. whatever the reason – I’m now done. I will not add any more of my original, insightful, highly opinionated and well-loved comments to the NBR until that woeful anti-accessibility piece of @#$ feature goes away. And I won’t add any more of the normal comments I make there either.
Lance Wiggs 
True words Lance. NBR would be smart to make all those changes you propose, and how they made such poor placement decisions is beyond my comprehension.
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Hi Lance,
The “Log-on to the new NBR” message at the top of the site is temporary, and due to be taken offline Tuesday.
It was necessary because after the pre-Christmas upgrade, all subscribers did need to log onto the system again. We wanted to put this message in a place where no one could miss it. People have come back from holiday at different times.
I’ll pass on your comments about the captcha system to NBR’s web developer.
Chris Keall
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Thanks Chris – It seems that a lot could be done with my login status. There is, for example, no need for anyone that is logged in to see the Log-in to the new NBR message, and nor, as I point out, the Captcha. L
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@Chris Keall while you are talking to the web developer get him to remove the CHANGELOG.txt file (ie nbr.co.nz/CHANGELOG.txt) from public view.
IMHO telling the world which version of Drupal you are running is not the best idea :)
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