Discussion for article #229980
@Josh_M Since I don’t have access to the Prime thread, I’m putting my comments about the commenting system here:
Overall it’s not too bad, which is to say it’s not as good as Disqus but better than Livefyre or Facebook comments. The main thing is that it has a bunch of annoying features (some deliberate, some that come up just as part of putting it together) that make it much less usable than it should be. Some of these should be addressable with simple coding changes if, as you said back in the beginning, it’s a flexible system.
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There’s way too much whitespace. It means you only see two or three comments at a time, even using small type on a large laptop screen like the one I have. Combine that with the laborious loading of comments in blocks, and it makes scrolling through them ponderously slow. It’s especially tough if you’re trying to follow a discussion thread through multiple replies, because it means jumping around (a useful feature), but the comments aren’t all loaded so it goes very slowly. This is the biggest thing, but I’m guessing it would also be the hardest to change.
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The auto-formatting is often really annoying. When I put an asterisk in front of something, it’s because I’m making a footnote, not a bullet list. When I put something in quotes, it’s because I’m writing a quote from a person, not quoting another comment.
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Related to this, the main reason people edit comments is to fix simple typos, or something like forgetting to put in “not” in a sentence which changes the meaning. So why does the system require that you change a certain number of characters? The other things I at least can understand, but this just doesn’t make sense.
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I’m not sure you’ve noticed, but if it gives you this notification you will - it allows comments on ed blog articles now (by going to the Article Topics page), although nobody but me seems to have noticed. Not sure if you want to fix that.