Pardon our dust. We're currently in read-only mode. You can read the site but can't do any of the fun stuff you're used to doing.

Newsvine is battling some database issues and will be fully functional as soon as they're resolved.

Good news: the operations teams won't just restore our database but upgrade it. This should improve the performance of database-heavy operations, like the conversation tracker.

We'll have a stabler, more responsive site to you as quickly as we can. Apologies for the inconvenience.

UPDATE: 1:09 PM PST: Commenting, seeding, publishing, and clipping capacities restored.

Hypothetically speaking, let's say Newsvine were to give away several HD video cameras to 'Viners to produce, say, one short video report/interview on personal finance and the economy every month. An example segment might be a video interview with a local businessperson who had successfully gotten credit for his or her new business and was up and running, or a person who hadn't made a mortgage payment in over a year and was waiting for their bank to take action. Reports would be featured on msnbc.com.

Any interest in the community for such a thing? If you'd like to be a part of it, please indicate your interest in the comment threads and some examples as to the sorts of subjects you'd want to cover.

Today is my last day at The Vine. I am moving on and looking forward to new adventures in life and business.

The Newsvine Team is honored to present our newest Newsvine Guide, Rottlady.

Rottlady has a long history of being helpful to her fellow Newsvine members, by being kind, patient and available to assist others. She also sets a great example by publishing creative, positive and engaging articles.

Rottlady joins our three other Guides, Viki Babbles Gonia, Red Wolf and Lauhal.

For more information on what Newsvine Guides do, please visit this article.

Please join us in congratulating Rottlady for the recognition of her many years of contributions and helpfulness around The Vine.

UPDATE: This Next Level Debate is now live, and can be found HERE. Welcome to the second installment of Newsvine Next Level.

Gone seem to be the days of good, lively debate. Recently there has been a ton of slapfighting between politicians, pundits, and the public.

Newsvine can be a pretty complex place, and as the site adds more new users, we want to help them get out of The Greenhouse that much faster. Fortunately for everyone, there are already some Viners who have done this for years.

To recognize these folks, we're giving them a designation - Newsvine Guide. Their comments will show up in a friendly brown, with a compass in the corner. It denotes that when it comes to using the features of Newsvine, these people know what they're typing about.

Who they are

Our new Guides are Red Wolf, lauhal, and Viki Babbles Gonia. They've been helping users in The Greenhouse and are active participants in Anti-Spam. We approached them after observing months upon months of polite, informative assistance on their part, and we're delighted to have them on board.

Compass on deck of derelict fishing ship by mikebaird on flickr.

What they'll do

What they were doing already, for the most part. Because of their extensive knowledge and ability to communicate that knowledge, they now have a designation that will hopefully make their guidance more resonant, especially with newcomers. (A shiny yellow comment may be better received than a gray one.) They're also still Newsviners - who will debate, write, and seed about more than just Newsvine. When commenting in their columns, their comments will show up as 'Author' and 'Seeder', not 'Guide'.

What they don't do

Guides are not expected to moderate or resolve disputes between users. This role will continue to be carried out by Tyler, our Community Moderator.

One of the Guides, Viki Babbles Gonia, will also be responding to some customer support mail.

Look down and you'll see a fresh new addition to article and seed pages for Newsvine users. We call it the Wetbar.

The Wetbar is a new tool we're releasing initially to Newsvine users and eventually across other sites powered by Newsvine technology (we're looking at you mothership). It's already on certain Newsvine powered pages like NBCSports and TODAYMoms but we're just getting started.

This handy little bugger should make it a lot easier to point your friends and followers to interesting discussions you're participating in (or fires you're starting) on the 'Vine. Facebook and Twitter have emerged as great ways to include your own social circles in activities you are involved in around the internet and we want to make it as easy as possible for you to accomplish this.

We've also placed a slightly different incarnation of the conversation tracker inside the Wetbar to see if people prefer its format to the traditional conversation tracker. Please let us know what you think in the comments.

E-mailing articles is now more advanced as well with one-click support for mailing via Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL.

Last but not least, if you've decided the Wetbar is not for you, you can click the 'hide tools' link and it'll scamper off into a corner.

Just a quick heads up that we'll soon be rolling out a new article editing interface. You'll notice an "Easy mode" and "XHTML mode" (quicktag buttons), wider editor width and article previews will pop open a new tab or window. Also, recently we began the process of removing some features that weren't being utilized much, in an effort to streamline and simplify Newsvine ahead of some future improvements. That's all for now, folks :)

Hello Newsviners,

The forms have been filled out and the hurdles have been cleared: As of today, I am officially registered to cover the 2010 Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas as an MSNBC.com / Newsvine correspondent, live-blogging from the NBC Universal Blogger Lounge and elsewhere aro …

From time to time we at Newsvine HQ like to remind the Community of certain rules that, if followed, help ensure that Newsvine remains a fair and equitable place for everyone.

Newsvine is excited to announce Wonderful World, a community hub where 'good news' stories from both the Wire and the Vine will be featured.

If this sounds like a familiar idea, it's probably because there's already a number of Viners who like to focus on good news, with many of them joining the group Good News Wednesday. Naturally, we wouldn't make a page like this without giving some shine to the community, the originators.

Good News Wednesday has its own featured spot on Wonderful World, right in the left-hand column, so if you've got some good news to share, join up and share some articles and seeds with the, well, wonderful world.

(My algorithms tell me humans like puns.)

Newsvine is a relatively young site, so we don't have many annual traditions. But one of our favorites is the Cinderella Bracket, our own lightweight take on the traditional NCAA Tournament Bracket.

Let's be honest: do you really have any special insight into that potential Marquette — Memphis matchup? Instead of throwing that 30th dart at the wall grinding out a full bracket, try picking just a handful of teams that you think will exceed expectations. The Cinderella Bracket gives you a fixed amount of credits to spend on a roster of teams, priced by seed. And you can even make up to three entries, so you can use one to pick the home team without feeling bad about it.

Can you guess this year's Cinderellas? If you think you can, or if you just want a shot at the brand new Xbox 360 that's this year's prize, give it a shot. Get your picks in before the opening tipoff Thursday morning.

It's been awhile since we launched Newsvine Groups. As we ramp up toward launching newly-redesigned groups, I'd like to solicit feedback on the most desired features for Newsvine Groups V2.

About an hour ago, we quietly launched the ability to connect your Newsvine account to your Facebook account via Facebook Connect. This is phase one in an ongoing project to allow various other social sites you may enjoy to integrate better with your activities on Newsvine.

On every sidebar except the front page sidebar (for now), you'll see a light blue box prompting you to connect your accounts if you happen to already be logged into Facebook. If you aren't logged into Facebook, or if you've already connected your accounts, you won't see the box.

Upon clicking the box, your Newsvine and Facebook accounts will become aware of each other and every time you vote on a story, this action will show up automatically in your Facebook news feed. We've only wired up votes for now but are curious as to what other sorts of functionality you'd like to see. Writing articles and seeding links will definitely come next and possibly comments after that, but with comments we're a little wary of people flooding their Facebook news feeds. Some of you leave over 100 comments a day on Newsvine (you know who you are!).

Aside from posting items to your Facebook news feed, are there any other bits of functionality you wish you had around here, leveraging your already established presence and relationships on Facebook? If so, leave your requests in the comments below.

Also, we've given Tyler the keys to the Newsvine Twitter feed. If you can't get enough of his knowledge nuggets on Newsvine, try the bite sized morsels now available on Twitter.

The Newsvine team would like to recognize the exceptional work of Shawn Gordon, in independently compiling and publishing the first-ever Newsvine book: The Unofficial Vine.

Shawn took it upon himself to create a project whereby the Newsvine community nominated and voted on the top articles ever published to The Vine. The winning articles were then compiled by Mr. Gordon into a book and put up for sale on Blurb. All proceeds from the sale of the book are to be donated to the American Red Cross. Shawn also chronicled the entire project from his Newsvine column, as well as the accompanying Newsvine group.

You may preview The Unofficial Vine here.

For an in-depth wrap up of what went into the project, please visit Scott Butki's interview of Shawn Gordon.

Please join the Newsvine team in recognizing one of the most creative and compelling projects ever carried out on Newsvine by congratulating Shawn Gordon with us.

The integration of msnbc.com discussion on Newsvine is undergoing a significant change today. Up until now, reading an msnbc.com article like this one and clicking on the "Discuss Story on Newsvine" link directed you to the column of the first person who happened to comment, seeding the article in the process. This has never been an ideal solution, but at the same time, it's brought over a lot of great new users into the Newsvine community.

On the downside, however, msnbc.com readers who might have only wanted to leave a simple comment on a story often found themselves responsible for moderating articles with hundreds of comments their first day on the Vine. Additionally, some Newsvine users began co-opting msnbc.com seeds, sometimes for the honorable purpose of providing quality moderation, and other times simply to goose traffic and earnings to their domain.

Quality msnbc.com articles -- once one of the great discussion starters on Newsvine -- were becoming places where it was difficult to get smarter, and hence a change became necessary.

Beginning today, all msnbc.com articles seeded through the "Discuss This on Newsvine" button on msnbc.com will generate a different type of seed: one that lives in special MSNBC editorial groups we've set up for all MSNBC sections. So, for instance, msnbc.com business stories seeded in this way will live in the Msnbc.com Business Group and not on the rest of Newsvine. We believe that by doing this, we will:

• make it easier for users who discover Newsvine through msnbc.com to more gracefully enter the community
• encourage all users to have more productive discussions
• encourage some of the people who spent time seed harvesting to write their own articles and seed links to different sources.
• continue to re-level the playing field with regard to what sources drive the most traffic
• increase the value of great original writing and thoughtful seeding around the 'Vine

Even after this change, you we still be able to seed msnbc.com articles, but they will live on Newsvine just as any other seed, and will not be related in any way to the seeds originating from the "Discuss This on Newsvine" button.

We also urge you to use the report tools willingly but responsibly. As always, we'll do our best to ensure CoH-compliant conversation, but we can't do it without you.

Beginning today, we are rolling out a completely rewritten comment system. Some users may notice the changes immediately, and others may notice the new stuff several days later. In other words, this is a rolling release, and since it may contain some bugs, we'd rather only a subsection of the Newsvine population be exposed to it at this time.

So, what's new??? A lot of stuff. Some visible and some under the covers:

A WYSIWYG comment editor

At long last, you can now style your comments on Newsvine without typing out longhand XHTML tags. Using the new row of buttons on top of the comment box, you can do things like bold and italicize your text as well as adding links. If you aren't into clicking buttons, you can also use familiar shortcuts like Command-B (or Control-B on Windows) to accomplish the same. We give our thanks to the good folks developing the open-source TinyMCE editor for this bit of welcome awesomeness. Since WYSIWYG text editors on the web don't always produce perfect results, you can always switch to XHTML mode and enter tags in the old fashion way if you like. Swapping back and forth between modes is easy.

Resizable comment box with full screen mode

One of the nice things about the new comment editor is that you can stretch it to be as tall or short as you'd like and your preferred size will be remembered. So if you're a bit longwinded, you can have a big comment box on every page, and if you're more succinct, you can choose a smaller size. Sometimes, however, you're SO passionately engrossed in the penning of a genius comment that you really can't be bothered by any other text on the screen while you're spewing your wisdom. In cases like these, you can now hit the "Full Screen" button and your whole browser will become a canvas for your prose.

Real pagination

As the comment counts have grown at Newsvine, we have been working on a pagination solution which seeks to be an unobtrusive as possible while still allowing for reasonable page load times. We hate pagination over here and we hate sending people to different URLs to read an entire conversation. It's kind of like how you can't just watch an entire season of Dexter by picking up a DVD at your local video store. You have to go to the store multiple times, rent multiple discs, and watch the season piecemeal. It's good for the store and the movie studio as they make more money off of you, but it's bad for you. Pagination is no different, really. Sure we get a few more page views, but the tradeoff is that conversations can become fractured.

Paginating on Newsvine is particularly difficult because we have threaded comments, the super-useful "new" buttons, and the conversation tracker. While those elements make proper pagination extremely difficult, they are also what make Newsvine discussion threads -- from a technical standpoint -- more useful than most other sites' discussion threads.

With this release, we're rolling out "phase 2" of proper pagination on Newsvine (phase 1 was the temporary solution that's been in place for the last couple of months). There will be one more phase to the release, but this one fixes a lot of stuff and makes things generally much better.

Firstly, the conversation tracker now works across multiple pages. Secondly, the "new" buttons and stars now work properly across pages. In other words, if the next "new" comment on a thread happens to be on page 4 and you're on page 1, click on the "new" button will teleport you to page 4. Thirdly, we've turned the final "new" button red so you know you're at the last new comment. Click that final "new" button and you'll be taken to the top of the page. And finally, we now have numbered navigation at the bottoms of our comment threads so you can jump from page 1 to page 30 or directly to the last page with a single click. We're actually encouraged by the amount of bug reports we've gotten every single day for the last month or so about this. We love that people are interested in seeing not just the first comments but also the most recent ones (and theirs, of course).

A new spellchecker

Although our old spellchecker was apparently so good that OldFogey used it to spellcheck his Word documents, it was less than clean under the hood. Aside from using dated code, a new version of it had to be loaded for each domain. In other words, if you read articles from two Newsviners, you loaded the spellcheck twice. We've now switched to TinyMCE's built-in spellchecker so you only have to load the (much smaller) code once. The spellchecker's quite sharp looking as well. We like it even better than the last one.

A complete rewrite of the entire comment rendering process

The code which displays comments on Newsvine is fairly intricate and hasn't been rewritten in a long time. Over the last several months, there have been a lot of enhancements we've wanted to make to comment threads (such as the ones listed above) that we've held off on until the whole thing could be rewritten. It is now rewritten! With all of this heavy lifting out of the way, we look forward to adding things like avatars, country flags, and other elements to Newsvine comment threads that will further set them apart from the rest of the industry's. You may also find that story pages load a lot faster with the new comment service running.

Look for more improvements soon!

In an effort to get the conversation tracker working with pagination, we recently released some changes that enable the "new" links to traverse from one page to the next.

The Newsvine Team is happy to introduce Tyler Adams as Newsvine's newest team member and Community Moderator. An experienced writer and editor, he will be responsible for the day-to-day preservation and advancement of Newsvine's discussions, as well as working with our existing documents to make Newsvine easier to understand for new users and veteran Viners alike.

In short, Tyler is here to help us get smarter about getting smarter. Calvin will be working closely with him during his tenure, but we expect him to establish himself in the community quickly, with your help. Please continue to give us feedback – it's the best way for us to improve our community.

As was the case with our previous Community Moderator, all concerns and correspondences regarding user behavior and abuse will go directly through Tyler from this point forward. He's also a big talker/typist, so we'll let him introduce himself.

On behalf of the Newsvine Team, msnbc.com, MSNBC Television and NBC News, I would like to show our appreciation to Miss Dev, for her amazing work in making Newsvine DNC 2008 coverage a complete success.

Without Dev's selfless hard work, creativity, inspiration, attention to detail, persistence and willingness to roll with the punches, our coverage of the DNC would not have been possible. Of the many things Miss Dev did, here are just a few that stood out as well above and beyond the call of duty:

• Finding Newsvine DNC HQ - a charming house with wifi (that also came with a car!), and stocking it with Colorado-brewed beer and vodka.
• Properly preparing us for our visit to Denver.
• Always being our eyes and ears on the ground.
• Churning out amazing articles day after day, while covering the convention, protests and security in Denver while also juggling 9-5 work!
• Spending 3.5 hours out in the 95+ degree Denver heat to get our press credentials.
• Handling all forms of logistics about where to meet, eat, drink, sleep and write.
• Being a good sport about being separated from the rest of us at Mile High.
• Inspiring her own Mom to also participate in Newsvine DNC coverage!

In addition to bringing Viki, Killfile and me to the DNC, Dev also successfully brought the DNC to thousands of people across the world, in the way that only she can do. She did this by consistently writing fantastic, honest articles that explored complex issues and problems facing ordinary Denverites, as well as America at large. The topics she covered were largely left unexplored by the media, which is why msnbc.com decided to feature the following stories written by Miss Dev directly on the Cover as well the Politics Section.

The Democratic Hypocrisy, or A Person's A Person

I Was There

The "Greenest" Convention

(In)security in Denver

Visiting Denver : A Local's Guide to Her Home City

All that she has done for us, and for Newsvine, goes far beyond being an amazing Newsviner and Citizen Journalist. She is, quite simply, an amazing person. Dev's work at the DNC has paved the road in many important ways for other Newsviners to cover future events that continue to shape our world.

Please join us in recognizing Miss Dev's amazing work, tireless commitment and her unparalleled all-around contribution to Newsvine's mission and purpose, by celebrating her Random Act of Vineness award.

- Calvin

On August 15th I announced the resurrection of an old favorite, the Last Viner Standing contest. It generated some discussion, we came up with some ground rules and Calvin chimed in and offered some prizes from Newsvine.

Random Acts of Vineness are usually handed out for solitary moments of greatness on the 'Vine, but every so often, a member of the community will make just as big an impact with a million smaller moments.

Tedd Riggs has been a Newsvine user for just shy of a year, and in that time, he's dedicated a huge portion of his vine time to fighting CoH violations and welcoming bright new users into the fold. Yes we are fortunate to have many users who dedicate themselves to similar samaritanism, but none with the sheer fortitude of the omnipresent Mr. Riggs. As of this writing, Tedd has posted over 23,000 comments on Newsvine – or over 65 a day – and many of them have been posted with the sole purpose of lending a helping hand around here.

The Newsvine community and the entire Newsvine Staff wish you the best of luck in your recovery from recent surgery, Tedd, and we collectively present you with this Random Act of Vineness for all you do in the good name of community.

I am very happy to announce that after several months of planning and collaboration between Newsvine users and staff, msnbc.com, NBC News and convention organizers - Newsvine will be sending several of our best contributors to both the Democratic National Convention and the Repub …