Blog Comments - Your Take

February 03, 2004 10 | Comments (Closed)

As part of my ongoing redesign I’m planning on reworking my comments. I’ve done a bit of research tonight on blog comments and all the various ways in which they are displayed, entered and organized.

There are all sorts of innovative ways in which folks are working with comments. Jon has a live comment preview and Dunstan has all kinds of interesting things happening.

There are almost as many ways to handle comments as there are sites out there. And there are more on the way. It sounds like that in Movable Type 3.0 there is going to be comment registration.

This is all great, but to be honest, I prefer a more simple, straightforward method of handling comments. I realize that I could do quite a bit with making the display of my comments a bit more readable and reader friendly and I plan on doing that.

I’m not too sure if I’ll go as far as some others have, but I’d like to explore my options. So how do you like your comments? If you’ve got any ideas, suggestions or (ahem) comments on the subject I’d love to hear them. Also, if you know of a great plugin or script, post it here so I can take a look.

Hopefully, with your help, I can set something in place that will be much better than what I’ve got now and we can all learn a thing or two while I’m at it.

What’s your take on comments?

Filed under: Web Development

Comments

1. patricia said:

I like the live comment preview. Saves me the trouble of having to hit the preview button, get sent to another page, etc. Doesn’t stop me from making mistakes when I’m in too much of a hurry to really think about what I’m writing, but really, there’s only so much a little javascript can do.

I treat trackbacks as comments; use Kalsey’s simple comments plugin to do that.

And smileys are good, but I know they’re not for everyone. :D

I like that you don’t have a cancel button. I’ve lost a few comments on other blogs because the Cancel button was where I’d expect the Post button to be or because, again, I clicked it by mistake because I’m in a hurry. I know, I know. I should pay more attention, but well, it’s nice to get a little help now and again.

Posted on February 3, 2004 09:27 PM | #

2. Scrivs said:

I think you may be in the same boat as me when it comes to wanting to get more out of a commenting system, but are restricted to the limits of what a blog commenting system could offer. In that same vein though, we don’t want to move over to a forum style structure either where things could get really out of hand. Honestly, the only thing I could ask for from a commenting system on any site is quality comments from people who actually put some thought into what they are writing. If that occurs, then the system always seems perfect.

Getting people like that however is something totally different.

Posted on February 3, 2004 09:33 PM | #

3. Chris Vincent said:

I agree with Scrivs. A nice, linear view of comments doesn’t seem to be a big deal. TrackBacks can logically be included in comments, but they should do so in a way that doesn’t disrupt the flow of things. I’ve yet to see a site which pulls that off.

At the same time, I can sense one thing that would make Dunstan’s comment thing way more useful. If selecting a comment would make the others fade and make the linked comment sweep in iChat-style, it’d be awesome. It doesn’t even have to have that effect though. It could just hide the other comments have the applicable ones snap in. I think it would make more use of the system than simple borders currently do.

Jon’s live preview is very cool. I have no suggestions about that, except to make sure you still keep your old-fashioned preview button.

Posted on February 3, 2004 09:51 PM | #

4. Andrei Herasimchuk said:

I’m most interested in comment management if there are 30+ comments. Pagination? I haven’t tried the plug-in I saw on the MT plug-ins site, but it may be too heavy and the flow might feel awkward from page to page.

I’m most likley going to explore an implementation that sets comments into their own divs and then sets “display: hidden” to collapse the comment content but reveal the title, with expand and contract icons that toggle this property via simple JavaScript and DOM manipulation. On page load, maybe collapse all but the last ten so the page doesn’t become way too long, and potentially avoids the pagination issue altogether? I guess we’ll see how it pans out.

Posted on February 4, 2004 01:08 AM | #

5. Dunstan said:

Re. Chris’s comment - I know of one person working on such a system, but it’s a long way off yet, and it wouldn’t be so dynamic, just hiding those comments that aren’t in the thread in question.

It actually gets a lot more complicated than it first looks, but there is a plan to produce something along those lines.

Posted on February 4, 2004 03:35 AM | #

6. Matt said:

Nice and simple. I guess that for me, a lot of the extra stuff is just adding on for the purpose of adding on. When it comes right down to it, I want the comments on my site (not many, admittedly :) ) to be easy to delineate and read. If you can nail that down, then you’ve won the battle.

I’ll happily admit that the live comment preview is pretty awesome, and serves a very good purpose. I HATE not knowing which tags will work, and which won’t. The only other thing I’d really like to see in a comment system is the ability to edit, but that just isn’t very feasible until MT3 rolls around.

I’ve always thought that you had one of the best comment displays around. Don’t work too hard to fix what isn’t broken.

Posted on February 4, 2004 07:36 AM | #

7. Nollind Whachell said:

I agree with Paul (Scrivs). Back when I was building sites for the computer gaming industry, this was the number one issue with forums that I saw. It seemed that everyone of us at the time wanted to create a rich community around the game site but almost over 90% of the forums posts were completely useless, as they were totally off topic. I thought there had to be a better way to entice people to write more richer content that actually related to the site. On the other hand, you didn’t want to impede people all together from posting frivolous stuff because it was their community as well and they had to be able to express themselves within it without their every word being scrutinized and approved.

The approach I came up with (which never saw the light of day) was to have a kind of daily or weekly question on the home page of the site. People’s comments to this question would be viewed upon a secondary page with all of their comments just listed in simple unthreaded format. So far, you’re probably thinking, this doesn’t sound any different than a typical blog. True. However, the spin I wanted to put on it was this. For those people (say the top three) who contributed really valuable content, their comments on this question would be elevated to the front page to be placed below the question. The idea here was to try to entice people that if they wrote great content, they would be recognized for it. At the same time, however, you could still easily click the question and see all of the comments as a whole thus not leaving anyone out.

The question now is would this work for a blog? If you don’t have a lot of people commenting on your site, I think it would be kind of useless to implement. You wouldn’t want to filter anyone thus giving them the wrong impression. However, on a more popular site with a lot of visitors and comments, this might be a better approach to focus on this good content coming in. Remember I was planning on implementing this on computer gaming sites with tons of gamers visiting it. As I said, 90% of them wrote off topic stuff, so we wanted some way to emphasize these people who did bring good content to the site.

As for how you could implement something like this from a technology standpoint, I have no idea. I know Slashdot utilizes an approach were the people themselves rate other people’s comments but the system I had in mind was for the moderators of the site to rate the posts. We had a few PHP gurus in the company, so I was confident that they could come up with some solution if we decided to go ahead with it. As I said though, it never saw the light of day, as our clients started moving away from community centered sites towards Flash-based brochure sites.

Posted on February 4, 2004 09:28 AM | #

8. Trevor said:

Web design or publishing to the web will become an every day task, just as the understanding of MS Office and word processing is. There will always be a divide between those that “do” and those that give the instruction to “do”. As more and more office aids add a form of WYSIWYG editors to the Office package that is used daily, the position for a webmaster in the office will be become less needed. Already Network Managers are having to do more www related activities and those in charge of marketing are dictating what is published to the web.

All in all it is a good thing, for the average person to be able to communicate on a grander scale and those creative types keep on creating for design firms.

Posted on February 4, 2004 05:22 PM | #

9. Pete said:

I thought a lot about user created content via a web interface on the last project I worked on, and at the end of the day I came up with using Flash!

With FlashMX I was able to create a WYSIWYG style editing area that looked similar to what was going to be displayed on the page, limit what code was being passed into the system (becuase the user doesn’t have to write html), not have to rely on javascript and the DOM, and it had a similar look and feel to a word processing package.

If anyone’s interested in seeing it, I can put it up somewhere.

Posted on February 5, 2004 03:07 AM | #

10. Jacob said:

Dunstan, Whitespace, and others have recently addressed blog comments and human interaction.

My take, with links to those, is here:

http://www.mavenglobe.com/blog/2004/01/18/blog_comments.html

I specifically mention Dunstan’s linear view and how it could be enhanced by making the non-highlighted comments fade/disappear, similar to what Chris and Dunstan mention above.

Posted on February 5, 2004 10:55 AM | #