Comments for Typo

Posted by Scott Laird Fri, 16 Sep 2005 02:10:00 GMT

I’m starting to look at expanding Typo’s comment system. I have a few goals:

  1. Give Typo the best comment system of any weblog engine.

  2. Make it easier to handle large numbers of comments. This includes some sort of comment threading as well as comment pagination. Yes, those conflict with each other. No, I’m not sure how I’ll resolve it.

  3. Make the comment system more resistant to spam. I’m not really sure which approaches I’m going to use for this either, but this is a well-explored problem, and I have a few ideas. Fortunately, Typo has always had a few features that discourage comment spam, and we’d like to add to that a bit.

  4. Add support for authenticated comments, ideally using one or more external user identity systems, like TypeKey or OpenID. Personally, I’m really excited about OpenID, and I’d like to have Typo become both an OpenID client and server.

  5. Increase the “socialness” of the comment system. Make it easier to conduct discussions in comments. Allow frequent users to track responses to their comments via RSS or email. Allow “community building” via comments. Consider allowing some forum-like features, like allowing users to re-edit their comments after they’re posted. This obviously depends on having a reasonable identity and authentication system.

  6. Make it faster while we’re at it. Posting new comments currently invalidates Typo’s entire page cache; there has to be a way around that so we can keep up with Slashdot when they link to a Typo site.

  7. Keep it easy to run. One of my basic goals with Typo is to minimize the number of configuration options in the system, following DHH’s mantra: ”flexibility is overrated.” At the same time, different people *do* have different needs; we need to find the right balance between having 50,000 little configuration options and force-feeding the One True Comment System down people’s throats.

My goal is to have something to show for this in the the next couple weeks; that depends on my consulting schedule and a few other things that are hard to predict, but I’m pretty optimistic about this.

Before I dig deeply into design, does anyone have any particularly good comment systems that we should look at? My current favorite is Dunstan Orchard’s on 1976design.com, but I’m open for suggestions. I’d love to hear about needs that I’m overlooking, too.

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Comments

  1. Boris Mann said about 4 hours later:

    Some additional ideas for comments:

    • full permalinks – e.g. comment/post-id/comment-id –> by not using #anchors, comments become more like first class web/HTTP citizens for referrer links, pointing to them, etc. etc.
    • single feed subscription; we’re in the midst of implementing a subscription framework that separates subscription from notification; today the notification would be email and RSS, and each user would have a single feed to subscribe to for all notifications; yes, this does depend on the identity system again

    Also, +1 for OpenID. I think this is the one we’re going to go with for Drupal, since it’s fully distributed. Let’s do interoperability testing. Pubcookie looks interesting because of the ties to Internet2 and also the integration for MS/IIS, but it will likely be more appropriate for corporate/institutional deployments.

  2. Tom Moertel said about 4 hours later:

    To handle large/long threads, what about something like Kuro5hin.org’s “dynamic threaded” mode, which displays deeply nested subthreads in outline form. The highest-level comments in the outline are fully populated with content, but lower-level comments are displayed in outline form, only their titles visible. Interested readers can click on toggle buttons near each node to dynamically show (or hide) the content for it or for the entire subthread it starts.

    The outline makes browsing large conversations efficient. Readers quickly take in the overall structure and then “zoom in” on interesting subthreads.

  3. Jon said about 4 hours later:

    Here’s an idea:

    A PREVIEW BUTTON! ;-)

  4. Bob Aman said about 12 hours later:

    I have to agree with Jon. Preview button is my biggest must-have feature at the moment. And a quick indicator of which filter is being used for comments. I’m so tired of inputting Textile into blogs that don’t allow it in the comments, but don’t mention this either, and then having it looks kinda wierd.

    I’m also going to put out a big huge vote for OpenID, because I’m working on an OpenID server system, and well, I really ought to be dogfooding it…

  5. Scott Laird said about 12 hours later:

    Typo actually has comment previews in the trunk, but they aren’t enabled here. That’s part of why I’m doing this–I’m basically maintaining two parallel comment systems for Typo right now, one for my site and one for the rest of Typo. I’d like to drop that down to one comment system.

  6. Scott Laird said about 12 hours later:

    Is your OpenID code something that we could potentially snarf into Typo?

  7. Mark Cross said 3 months later:

    Is this going to make it in v4 now?

    Cheers Mark

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