'You Took The Warning Off Because It Was Ugly, Not Because It Was Wrong'

Last week this newspaper removed four of the five places it told you it was fiction. The red bar above the masthead, the legal paragraph in the footer, the reminder in every article's rail and the line on every Vault document are all gone. The About page, the footer line, the noindex instruction and a robots.txt that refuses every crawler remain. We said at the time that four warnings on one page was three too many. Readers have views.

You have confused tidiness with honesty

I spent thirty-one years in trading standards. The question is never whether a warning is elegant. It is whether the person who most needed to see it saw it.

Your argument is that four labels on one page is redundant. My argument is that redundancy is the entire point of labelling. We do not put one warning on a bottle of bleach and call the other three clutter. We put them everywhere the hand might land, because the hand does not land where the designer expects.

You have kept the label in the places a careful reader looks and removed it from the places a careless one does. That is exactly backwards, and I think you know it, because your own front page told me for a year and now it does not.

Winnifred Oyelaran-Baptiste, Hull

The editor replies: We think the noindex instruction and the blanket robots.txt do more work than the red bar ever did, because they stop the problem upstream — nobody arrives here from a search engine thinking they have found news. But the objection about where the careless reader looks is a good one and we have not answered it. We are not going to pretend we have.

Thank you, it was unreadable

I have been reading you for eight months and I stopped opening articles on my phone because by the time I got past the red bar, the label, the kicker, the standfirst and the box in the rail telling me again that it was fiction, I had lost the will.

You were shouting at me for agreeing with you. It is gone and the paper is better.

Desmond Achterberg-Lyle, Baltimore

A middle position nobody is taking

Both of your correspondents above are right, which suggests the choice was framed wrong.

The red bar was bad because it was loud, not because it was there. A single quiet line under the masthead — the size of your dateline, in the same face — would have satisfied the trading-standards objection at a fraction of the visual cost. You had a design problem and you solved it by deleting the content.

Ottoline Baszczuk-Ferrand, Zurich

The editor replies: This is the letter that has been passed round the office. We do not have an answer to it yet. We are looking at the masthead.

The vault is where it matters

The line you removed from the documents is the one I would fight for. An article is obviously an article. A document with a chain of custody, a reference number and a transcription note looks exactly like a real document, because you have gone to considerable trouble to make it look exactly like a real document.

Somebody is going to screenshot PX-1207 and put it somewhere else, and now it will travel without the sentence that said it was invented.

Ignatius Fairweather-Sunda, Santa Fe

The editor replies: This is the strongest letter we received and it names a real risk we did not weigh properly. A screenshot of a Vault page now carries no statement of what it is. We are going to fix that specific case.

On a lighter note, your horoscopes are still wrong

Ninth consecutive month. I am a Capricorn and nothing you have predicted has occurred.

Perpetua Vandenbroucke-Ige, Manchester

The editor replies: Correct, and the fine print under every reading says so. It is the one part of this newspaper that has never claimed otherwise.