How to use the Undoctored and Wheat Belly Blogs
Edition 2018-09-04
Unless you are a member of one of Dr. Davis’
subscriber forums, such as Undoctored Inner
Circle (where you may be viewing this article), your web
interactions with him are constrained by the
limitations of his blogs, the
UdB: Undoctored Blog
(blog.undoctored.com)
and
WBB: Wheat Belly Blog (wheatbellyblog.com/blog/).
Here are some tips in FAQ form, based entirely
on user trial and error, as an ordinary* reader
of the blogs. This applies only to the blogs,
and not Wheat Belly on FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn,
Pinterest, Google+ or YouTube. I do not follow WB
on those sites.
For the benefit of infrequent legacy users,
the Wheat Belly Blog changed format in May 2014.
The present how-to article was updated
to cover what WBB users need to know under the new layout.
WordPress itself changed in mid 2018.
Are Video Transcripts Available?
Yes, for most videos posted in 2017 or later. Longer videos,
and those with extensive visual content, may not have
transcripts. Most of these transcripts are done by me.
Where there isn’t a transcript:
for the hearing-impaired and those with platform limitations,
the video content that is hosted by YouTube, as seen at
YouTube, has optional
Closed Captioning, selected by controls at lower right.
Note that these subtitles are speech-to-text apparently
generated by YouTube, and are well less than fully accurate.
Any Vimeo-hosted content appears to lack a CC feature.
How Can I Find {Topic}?
The UdB has no search feature at all.
The WBB’s own Search engine is a bit weak.
It apparently only finds content in post
titles and basenote content, and never in user Replies.
There is no longer a side list of common topics linked
to multiple articles on those topics (which wasn’t
comprehensive even in the old format). The FAQ link
is still a very short list.
To search the blogs more extensively, use an external search
engine, such as
UdB: Google
Advanced
WBB: Google
Advanced,
In either case, restricting the "site or domain" to
blog.undoctored.com or wheatbellyblog.com (pre-loaded for the links shown).
To find your own replies later, bookmark them as soon
as you post them. If there are few enough Replies on a
topic when you do that, note that the URL (aka http link
or web shortcut) may change when older replies are shifted
off to numbered page links. Your original URL will at
least get you to the correct topic. Update the bookmark
as needed (as I have to do periodically for various
articles I maintain that link to blog comments).
Who Can Post Replies?
Anyone, choosing any user name, but probably requiring
a real email address (not visible to other readers).
The user name is published.
I would suggest using a reasonably unique user name, so
that your prior comments can more easily be found via
external search, and so that you aren’t mistaken for
someone else when discussing specific situations.
The blog apparently does not check for user name conflicts,
so you can accidentally use the same name someone else has
used. The blog may check for abusive names, and deliberately
spoofing someone else is apt to have consequences.
The email address is not published.
The email address is probably vetted (by means other than
sending an email). If it’s not from a blacklisted domain,
and not specifically blocked due to prior abuse, it’s
likely good to go.
What do I put in the “Website” field?
Any Website URL is applied to the published user name.
The “Website” field is optional, so leave it
blank if you haven’t an obvious use for it. You can
change it from Reply to Reply. The following are useful uses:
- Your Facebook page or personal website (see discussion).
- Sites and forums compatible with Undoctored and Wheat Belly.
- A second URL in cases where your response needs to
link more than once, and you want to avoid moderation.
- A commercial website, with some care.
I often used to use it to point to this same article on
Wheat Free Forum, and now use it to point to an extended
disclosure statement here on UIC.
The Website field is frequently abused by spammers,
scammers, trolls, as well as crackers who want to
lead readers to malware. This usually results in the
link being removed shortly thereafter, but can easily
result in the entire reply being deleted, and if
the abuse is blatant and obvious; banning. Vacuous
reply prose with links to commercial sites get deleted.
Almost any kind of reply with links to sites clearly
incompatible with Undoctored and Wheat Belly gets
deleted. Links to
almost any kind of “affiliate” site
results in link removal at the very least.
How Do I Get My Avatar to Appear?
If you have a WordPress account, and are using the email
address associated with it, the blog will use any avatar
you have set up and currently selected.
The blog may or may not also use some social media API, and so
by default may depend on:
- having an account on one of the social media
sites shown at WBB page top right (presently
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Google+
or LinkedIn);
- having an avatar on at least one of those sites;
- using an email address for WBB comments that
matches that used on the social media site
that has the avatar; and
- perhaps also what cookies infect your
PC/pad/mobile, or how much the social media
site is blabbing about you.
If you don’t have enough of the above to get an avatar
to appear, use
Gravatar
(which creates a free WordPress account).
Be aware of a couple of caveats on that:
- you’ll have to provide Gravatar with the
email address to be matched, and
- the avatar is likely to retroactively show up
in every comment you’ve ever posted anywhere
on the internet linked to that email address.
You might want to create a new email account for
the purpose. I can tell you that having a Yahoo
account with an avatar, and posting replies using
that email address, does not pull in that avatar.
How Can I Start a New Topic?
You can’t. It’s not a forum. If you are interested
in addressing the community of Undoctored/Wheat Belly
followers, you can:
• join Undoctored
Inner Circle, or
• create a free account on Wheat Free Forum.
If you are trying to get Dr. D’s attention, post
as a Reply to a suitable topic (but see Locked
Threads issue below). For a question, be sure
to use an external search first.
And no, there is no published email address for
the Dr., other than for media. If any addresses
he uses become widely known, he’ll probably have
to abandon them.
So how do user posts become basenote topics?
Dr. D. creates a new topic and copies your Reply into it.
Here’s a WBB example: (Flash
in the Pan Fad Diet?).
What Do I Need to Know About Posting Replies?
- Pick a blog
Base articles are sometimes mirrored on both blogs, so
if your comment relates to the article, the choice doesn’t matter.
Otherwise, use Wheat Belly Blog for diet-centric issues, and
Undoctored Blog for everything else. Although articles may be
mirrored on both blogs, comments are not.
During 2017, the Wheat Belly Blog shifted to ad-supported.
The Undoctored blog is not. If the WBB ads (which are somewhat
randomly context/user-dependent, can be contrary
to the program. If you find them annoying, use an ad-blocker
(I use the NoScript extension in FireFox).
- Older threads lock soon.
New Article threads older than X weeks
are locked (have no Reply links). I have seen
X vary between 2 and 4 weeks, and it was
14 days when this article was last updated. It
may be being adjusted based on the volume of
new articles, to limit the number of open threads.
- Pick a related thread where possible.
If you have a comment or question unrelated to
a currently open thread, just post it on the
newest open thread. Blog comment threads can get a bit
polluted with off-topic content; can’t be helped.
- Post source snippets.
«I conjecture that…»
I disagree…
Replies can get disconnected all too easily,
leaving readers wondering what you’re on about.
The rendering of the blog for mobile devices
apparently doesn’t preserve indents. What you
replied to can get deleted, or eaten by a blog bug.
In any case, people have to scroll up to ponder
what you might have had in mind. So quote some
of the source, using "quotes" or some sort of
] setoff punctuation or allowed
<em>markup</em>.
See Markup topic for markup supported.
Avoid:
< less-than, greater-than > (these get eaten)
I personally use:
«…» double angle quote marks (Alt+0171, Alt+0187 on Windows)
These also work:
“…” Unicode double quote marks (U+201C, U+201D), or
"…" plain old double
Unicode single angle quote marks (U+2039, U+203A)
also work on the blog, but cannot be represented in this FAQ
article on the UIC forum (apparently a bug).
- Reply Threading
In a typical topic thread,
there are two kinds of _Reply_ links:
a. The one at the bottom of the page is
for replies to the basenote.
b. Those under previous Replies are for
replying to those replies.
If there are replies with and without
_Reply_ links, those without are at the maximum nesting depth.
- Nesting Depth
The blogs have always limited reply nesting to 5 deep.
Those at level 5 had no reply links. To reply to something
at the bottom of the level 5 replies, reply to the nearest
level 4 reply above. Your reply may not end up directly
under what you’re replying to, so quote source snippets.
- Including hyperlinks
A link can be posted either as a cleartext URL, or as an
<a> tag.
- Don’t include more than one link if you want to
avoid moderation (other than using the UserID
trick for a 2nd).
- For simple (and reasonably short and self-explanatory
links), it’s usually easier to just paste the raw
URL into your comment. The blog engine converts it
to an <a> tag.
- Security (was: CAPTCHA timeouts)
Challenge test captcha is no longer used on WBB and there doesn’t
seem to be any nesting failure for replies that
aren’t posted rapidly.
The new format seems to be using other
heuristics to block ’bot replies. This occasionally
seems to block content that seems completely harmless.
If I can puzzle it out, I’ll update here.
- Moderation
Various things can cause your post to not
appear immediately (to anyone but you and the moderator(s)).
I am not a moderator. Of the things that non-abusive
posters do, the main cause for moderation is including
more than one URL in your reply (even if all such URLs
are to the blog itself or other Dr. Davis sites).
To reference multiple URLs, there are some choices:
- Put them in a post on another site, such as
Wheat
Free Forum, and link to that.
- Use multiple Replies.
- For just 2 URLs, put one in the “Web Site”
field of the dialog. I have tested this and found it
to work, but be sure to clear that field on your next post,
as your cookies will cause it to be re-populated with the
last used URL.
If you end up in moderation it can take an unpredictable amount
of time before the Reply gets reviewed and released.
- Abuse
Spamming, trolling and personal attacks can cause
Replies to vanish, and might result in email addresses,
or even domains, being banned as well. Egregiously foul
language might do it too. Simple complaints or challenging
questions about your program results do not get you deleted.
I think the blogs hear from pretty much everyone who
doesn’t get immediate textbook results.
On the white hat side, there is no [Abuse] link,
nor any other way to notify the WBB moderator(s) of
abusive articles, a definite shortcoming of the blog.
The blog is filtering A LOT of cruft. Some still sneaks
through, but it was much more extensive back before the
CAPTCHA was implemented in the old format.
I don’t recommend posting replies to abusive or
spammy material that sneaks through the filters.
It tends to vanish on its own in 24 hours or so,
but any replies posted to it remain, orphaned,
floated to the top level of responses, and any
new responses to them may also be disconnected and
floated to the top, which makes a bit of a mess
of things. I report a lot of user ID spam, but
very rarely abusive content (my threshold for abuse
is a lot higher than Dr. D’s). Even with UID spam,
unless the Reply content is content-free (often the
case), the usual remedy a moderator will just
delete the link from the UID.
- Formatting (or rather the lack thereof)
The Wordpress editing engine appears to convert
most entered content to plaintext in some weight of Lato font.
Pre-applied bold, italics, font changes, lists, tables, images, etc.
all get flattened or deleted. Some HTML markup may be applied in the
edit window.
The text dialog definitely accepts 8-bit western
roman characters, and quite a bit of Unicode,
which does not appear to be limited by the font in use.
It is clearly not limited to code
points which have HTML named character entities.
The Wordpress engine appears to be doing both fallback
and glyph embedding.
Unfortunately, you may not know if it supports any
random character above code point U+00FF until after
you click [Post Comment]
or
[Share My Comment!] .
Entering [Enter/Return] ends a paragraph.
[Shift[Return]] just forces an end of line.
Non-breaking spaces work (Alt+0160
on Windows), as do a great many Unicode characters.
If, during edit, a character you type or paste in vanishes, becomes
a ? or a box, it’s probably not going to work.
When rendered, some special characters (typically
Unicode emoticons) are sometimes served as a linked
graphical image, rather than Unicode code points,
and this behavior is not consistent. When a graphic is
served, the HTML includes an ALT="X"
attribute,
where X is the actual Unicode. If you happen to copy
a blog comment into a word processor app, use
paste-special(text) to avoid a performance
and size hit from pasting an <IMG> tag with
remote content.
Proof-read: there is no [Preview] button,
much less any [Edit] or [Delete].
- Permalinks
When you click [Post Comment]
or
[Share My Comment!] ,
and if no moderation or blocking occur, the site engine immediately
goes to the permalink for your comment, as seen in the target address field
of your browser. You can bookmark it,
or copy it either from the browser’s target line, or via
(typically) via right-click copy-link from the dateline
just under your username. A copy of your comment is emailed
immediately to anyone subscribed to the thread (excepting you).
- Serving
Thanks to unwanted WordPress “enhancements” during 2018, your comment
may not be immediately visible. This also means we no longer see the indication
that it went into moderation. Re-load the page some minutes later.
HTML markup supported is described at
the bottom of this article.
Can I Expect Dr. Davis to Answer My Question?
Maybe. He only responds to a very small percentage
of reader comments, which is not surprising given the
amount of time it would take to respond to them all.
He does seem to be more likely to respond if the
question is on-topic, of general interest, hasn’t
been previously addressed on the blog or in the books,
or only needs a quick easy answer.
There are a number of regular blog readers who
respond to questions that have been addressed before,
or are answered in the books, or where the question
needs some additional detail to enable an answer.
One of those readers is me. When a reader answer
handles the matter, it may be the only answer provided.
Dr. Davis is more likely to respond to questions
on the UIC Forum. Although a subscription site,
you can see entire basenotes, and responses with 250
characters or less. There’s no indication that Dr. Davis
ever visits other nutrition or health forums
other than those he operates.
A Reply Just Appeared on a Locked Thread, How?
Presumably, something about that reply caused it to get
placed in moderation, and it didn’t get released until
after the thread closed, and then released.
How Can I Follow Discussions?
You can Subscribe to all changes, Comments, or just new
content on a single thread, using whatever RSS features
or extensions are available for your browser. I use
Live Bookmarks in Firefox to track new Comments on
all open threads, for example. The blogs do not appear
to have a Push capability enabled.
The [SIGN UP!]
and [YES! SIGN ME UP!]
feature at {blog} right (maybe top on mobile)
results in Newsletter emails, which are periodic (not instant)
include links to new base articles, recipes and other material,
but nothing on Blog comments.
If you post a comment (and you do need to post a comment for these), the:
Notify
me of new posts by email
generates instant emails on new Blog articles, but nothing for new comments.
and
Notify
me of follow-up comments by email.
generates an email for each new comment
reply on just the current thread, but not new articles.
When you sign up for email notifications (but not RSS), you
get an email with a link to confirm it. You get a new one of
these on your first response to any thread. This prevents
someone from maliciously flooding your email box.
The new article email notifications are sent instantly.
Any of the emails can be cancelled by following an
unsubscribe link at the
bottom of any recent similar email.
I only see one check box
If the
Notify
me of follow-up comments by email.
is missing, you are on a draft blog page. Don’t
post your comment there. It may not be seen by anyone, and
you won’t be notified of responses.
Preserve your comment text and repost it on some open thread
found from the main blog. These orphan draft pages are being
routinely de-linked
I didn’t get a confirmation email. What to do?
In December 2015 through February 2016, that
WordPress feature became unreliable for the WBB.
I was personally getting a confirmation email
less than half the time. It could happen again.
When they work, these emails are sent immediately.
If you don’t get one (but have previously), just
click this link to the WordPress
Pending page.
Check the boxes for the threads you want to follow and click
[Confirm].
If you’ve never gotten a confirmation email, make
sure your ISP and/or email client filters aren’t
treating WordPress email as spam or junk.
Sorry, comments are closed for this item.
Means the thread closed to comments while you were composing your remarks.
I’ve had this happen once.
Use your browser back feature. Copy the comment from the edit window.
Post it on an open thread.
No threads open for comments.
If Dr. Davis hasn’t posted or re-posted in 14 days, no posts will
be open for comments. Wait a few days.
How can I link to a specific reply?
User Name
December 8, 2016 at 4:06 PM
⇐ this dateline is a permalink
The date line that appears under usernames on
replies is a permalink to that specific comment.
Right-click/copy, or just click on it and copy it
out of the browser’s target dialog.
A link I found to an old blog post or reply
is 404 (not found). What happened?
Most commonly, it means that Dr. Davis re-posted
an older article (including all of its comments).
This changes the base URL of the article, and
breaks any links to where it used to be, and
any deep links to replies on it. If you can,
let the referencing author know about the 404 link.
They might be able to update it.
Less frequently, the blog undergoes a complete
re-organization, such as in May 2014. This can
cause the above problem, and some things may
just vanish entirely.
HTML Markup Supported
Very little HTML markup is allowed in Comments by the
Wordpress blog engine. Avoid the use the common Latin (ASCII)
< (less than) and > (greater than)
characters except as the few HTML tags (elements, aka tags)
that are known to work. < causes problems even inside
HTML attribute quotes, so avoid it except as deliberate
markup, or "escaped" as entity >
In particular, do not attempt to quote in <this style>.
The blog engine deletes any unsupported content inside
the pair, and renders it as <>. Posting an empty <>
pair causes the <> to be deleted as well. Using ordinary
straight double quotes ("as here") is fine for simple cases.
WP converts them to curly quotes (“as here”).
Because the blog has no Preview, Edit or Delete, if you are going
to try markup, you really need to be using an independent tool
that provides HTML validation, HTML preview and line wrap without
line breaks. I don’t plan to expand this into a tutorial.
These markups are listed for the benefit of those with some
fluency in HTML.
The following HTML elements have been reported to work in
comments on Wordpress blogs. I have not tested them
on any other WP blogs. I do not know yet know how
many Attributes are allowed.
Tags Tested:
<a>,
<abbr>,
<acronym>,
<b>,
<blockquote>,
<code>,
<em>,
<i>,
<strong>
As <acronym> was officially dropped
for HTML5 I’d expect Wordpress to either stop allowing it,
or convert it to <abbr> at some point. So use <abbr>.
Although elided after posting,
<p> and </p>,
and <br> or <br />
may be safely used for proof-read formatting in your HTML editor,
as long as
<p> and
<br… start a new line
in your raw text.
<address> does not work, although some
sources claim it’s supposed to on Wordpress.
HTML Attributes Tested
cite= gets served out, but is metadata only
title= works
id= is stripped out
name= is stripped out
style= is stripped out.
HTML Entities Tested
There’s a good chance that HTML named and numbered
(decimal or hex) entities all get served.
Numbered entities need a test, and browser support for entities
is not universal, especially, I expect, for those that are
recently adopted Unicode.
Found to work so far:
• (•),
° (°),
… (…),
( ),
ω (ω),
√ (√),
« («),
» (»),
“ (“),
” (”),
< (<),
> (>)
Higher order Unicode characters, however entered, may not
be served as-is. They may get served out as <img> SVG’s
hosted on the WP site, and tagged with alt="Ü", where Ü is the
actual Unicode character you typed in (probably whether as text
or HTML Entity markup). No, that doesn’t mean that YOU can use
the <img> tag 
___________
Bob Niland
[disclosures]
[topics]
* I became
a Blog
Reply Associate (now just Blog Associate) on the Wheat Belly Blog some
years after first authoring this How-To article.
Tags: blog,RSS,Wheat Belly