January 23, 2014

Note: Comment policy new and improved

Comment moderation is now off, and so is word verification. Hopefully this will let comment threads develop more quickly and organically.

I only had them in place before to deal with spam, bots, and the odd attention-whoring loser. I can still delete comments and ban individuals, and that ought to be enough.

The catch is that there's no more anonymous commenting. I would've preferred to let folks just write in their name (with or without a URL), but Blogger does not give us that option. The option that includes "name / URL" also includes "totally anonymous," and that's a problem.

Until they change that, comments require you to be signed in to something -- the list is pretty long and easy to meet. If you don't have an account with Google, AOL, WordPress, etc., try setting up a nickname with OpenID.

It'll be better for everyone reading the comments to be able to distinguish who said what within a thread, and across threads. A list of comments all by "anonymous" looks lame and off-putting.

As for mechanics, the "comments" link now sends you to a text box just below the main post, so you can still see it while writing. Now you can preview your comment before publishing if you want. And it also has a "reply" option that the separate comments page did not. It just looks and works better than the separate page that I'd been using since forever.

4 comments:

  1. Yeah, I always thought to myself it was lame and confusing with so many anonymous posts. I was hesitant at the thought of needing to log into an account, but trying it out now, it looks to be a promising comment policy.

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  2. Also, thanks a lot for letting me read the whole text of the article in my feed reader. The trucated feed meant that I missed out on a lot of articles because of, "Ugh, I don't want to open yet another tab to read this article." This will greatly reduce that.

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  3. James, I noticed another comment of yours went into the mod queue -- it's set to only catch those left on posts more than two weeks old.

    As for the feed change, I don't even know how those work, so I probably hadn't ever looked at that setting. Glad to hear it works better now.

    I'll be putting up a user input post around Sunday, to see what else I can tweak to make the experience easier and more enjoyable. (For example, something like 25% of my pageviews are seen on a mobile device. But I don't have a smartphone, so I have no intuition for how to improve the mobile settings.)

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  4. Good to know. I thought maybe it had not been sent at first and re-tried.

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You MUST enter a nickname with the "Name/URL" option if you're not signed in. We can't follow who is saying what if everyone is "Anonymous."