Comment System - Take 1.0
Or maybe, take 0.9. Deciding on version numbers is hard. But let's go with 1.0.0 and call it a day. My original hope had been to get this posted by yesterday; clearly, that did not happen. It was close though! I kept close to my original schedule before running into a mind-numbing issue receiving responses when comments are submitted. The problem ended up being the way that jQuery AJAX calls respond to CORS requests without the right response headers from the server (in Chome at least). Fun, no? Easy to fix, once I figured, but a pain to debug through a browser, load balancer, proxy server, and app server.
What's Working and What Isn't
This version of commenting is just the functionality needed to allow comment submission and basic administration. I'm still working on how to display the comments and working out a few bugs in the approval/rejection part of the administration (as well as a few more fancy bits). Despite the comments not being displayed yet, anything you send now will show up once I get that work finished.
My initial research showed that most comments fit into three major categories:
- Problems - Anything that a reader thinks is correct such as a typo, grammatical mistake or some factual inaccuracy.
- Questions - Requests to clarify something that was said in the article or about the site in general.
- Comments - In this category I include any commentary about what is said on that page or the site in general including suggestions for changes or feedback about design/style/format/UI/UX/whatever.
For now, I am seeing what happens when readers are allowed to call out what kind of comments they have. When submitting a "comment", you can provide 1 or more of these types of comments and I will respond differently to them. Simply click the "Submit Comments/Feedback" button on the left (above the article info), select the type of comment/feedback, and provide the information it asks for. Add as many different comments as you want and then click "send" to submit them. Some feedback types let you select portions of the page but only some of those require that selection - I think it'll be fairly clear once you try it for yourself but let me know if it isn't. Providing a name to identify yourself when your comment(s) is posted and an email address - so you can be notified when your comment(s) is posted - are optional.
So...Why?
As mentioned briefly before, I'm not a huge fan with the way that most comments systems work on the Internet today. The comments left for an article (or whatever content they are attached to) are typically a mix of unrelated content (e.g. the categories mentioned above); they are good interaction between author and individual readers but many are otherwise irrelevant to every other reader.
This mixing often results in a confusing mess that becomes hard to interact with beyond a certan size. I'm of the opinion that this general insanity of comments contributes to the relatively low rate of participation seen on most "social" websites (I'm counting any site with comments as "social" in additional to the more typical "social media" sites). How to improve this situation is still a mystery to me but I'm doing some research (more on that in another post) and will be changing my comment system based on that research and feedback I receive from you lovely people.
Later today, I will go through and update most of the existing pages to add the ability to comment. If the "Submit Comments/Feedback" button is visible on the left side of the page, above the article info, you can submit comments; if not, then comments have been enabled for that page yet. I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback!