Things that piss me off #93741: appalling commenting functionality

[andrewducker]

I'm sorry, but if you run a blog, forum, discussion site, or whatever, and you have comments, and the commenting system does not _at a minimum_ allow for threaded comments and the ability to receive comments letting me know when someone has replied to me then your system is made of massive, epic fail.

Because I do not have the time, attention span or wish to bookmark your comments page and come back to it repeatedly, just to see if someone has replied to a comment I made.  And I do not wish to go trawling through every comment that occurs under your post to see if someone has said "@37 I have important information which could change your mind."

And so I need to see threads, so that I can tell which comments are replies to which other comments, and thus are part of a coherent conversations.

And I need to be emailed if someone replies to my comment, so that a fruitful conversation can take place.

I do not see why either of these pieces of functionality are in any way surprising or outlandish. 

I really can't see how you can expect to have useful comments without them.

And if you didn't want that, why do you have comments at all?

Comments

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

Oh THIS.

[red-phil.livejournal.com]

@miss_S_b: I Don't know what your talking about.

[flickgc.livejournal.com]

[snork]

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

:P

Just because you have pretty hair...

[cdave]

One plausible reason is that you want feedback on the main post, not a conversation.

Or as an unplanned side effect of a system like that is it will discourage long rambling off topic conversations as they are hard to maintain, so they wouldn't want to switch to a threaded discussion page.

[matgb]

The comment threads on politicalbetting.com are terrible. Which is a massive shame, as the site itself is good for amongst the best psephology in the UK. but the comments are pretty impossible to follow as they drift everywhere, which is a shame as while the signal/noise ratio is crap, the actual signal when you find it is normally brilliant.

They could switch to threading easily, and could likely make people talk properly on there as well, but they don't seem to have the imagination.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

It's a matter of personal preference. I broadly agree with you, but I was talking to someone just last night who said he doesn't use LJ because the comments are threaded. I expressed surprise, saying I thought threaded comments were a feature, but he pointed out it makes it hard to spot the new comments. (Yes, there are ways around that, but the basic point stands.)

[red-phil.livejournal.com]

The answer of course it to have multiple comment views. Threaded, Chronological, highest-rated, etc.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I miss usenet. I keep hoping someone will come up with an equivalent of the newsrc for browsers.

[nameandnature]

I wrote a Greasemonkey script, though that only works on LJ and Dreamwidth Our Saviour, not other places where you can leave comments.

[mooism.livejournal.com]

The answer to a usability problem is not always to introduce a new widget for people to interact with (read: fail to use properly, or fail to see it when they need it).

If you make your comment in threaded view, how am I to know the context if I am reading in chronological view? If I make my comment in chronological view, how will the computer know where it goes in threaded view?

Highlighting new comments with a different background colour might be a better solution.

Commenting systems are not a solved problem.

[andrewducker]

Highlighting comments means tracking the last time you visited each page and storing that data in a cookie or similar. I'm not sure that's a great way of dealing with it either.

[matgb]

Tell him about ?view=flat, which I keep meaning to write a hack to to make it clickable for people.

Some people dislike threads, and I wonder if there's a link between people who started online discussions on /. or LJ and thread preferences compared to people used to blogger or forums.

[professoryaffle.livejournal.com]

I have this as a bookmark to fix styles I don't like probably would work the same for view flat I would guess

javascript:location.search+=(location.search?'&':'?')+'style=mine'

[nameandnature]

Does Convotracker work, I wonder? I found it while ego-surfing for people talking about my Greasemonkey script.

[andrewducker]

Interesting - I'll give it a go at some point!

[lizw.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested to see if Google Wave will do anything to make people less resistant to comment threading, since it has a replay function for people who really want to see things chronologically. As matters stand right now, I agree with you entirely. I rarely comment on posts outside LJ and its spin-offs precisely because of the lack of comment threading. Services like co.mments and ConvoTracker can solve the problem of forgetting which posts to go back to, but not the problem of getting inundated with notifications for comments that are nothing to do with yours because there's no threading.

The result is that away from LJ and DW, I basically only do drive-by comments, which feels unfair to other participants, so I keep it to a minimum. On LJ and DW, conversations can be far more sustained, and of course I still have the option of tracking the whole post if I really want to - which isn't very often, but does happen occasionally with, say, a post asking for book recommendations or asking other very specific questions that I might want to see answers to.

(Here via miss_sb, btw).

[andrewducker]

Seen you about a fair bit. Have considered adding you before. Seems like a good time to get around to it :->

[po8crg.livejournal.com]

I always assume that all web-based comment systems are intended only for drive-by comments, unless they have a way of getting you to come back - and even then, I often can't follow the email link at the moment it arrives, and then forget it.

What I really want is for all sites to have a proper commenting API, so I can do the comments from a proper application running on my own machine that can do real threading - even LJ drives me nuts as I can't see the whole thread structure in a thread pane and the current comment in the comment pane, and also that is a local app and responds at a sensible speed, and doesn't need to be connected; it can just do a sync from time to time.

Basically, I want usenet back.

[cesy.livejournal.com]

Yes, this.

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

I completely agree. I am not quite sure about the WordPress comment threading system, yet.

An equally big failure are comment systems which tell me when anyone comments. Really irritating.