Following the discussion

by admin on February 13, 2006

I’ve been playing with CoComment over the weekend (sad I know). I generally like it but there are some potential issues which i’ve posted to the ideas section of the CoComment Forum and which I reproduce here:

1. Choice to truncate comments – at the moment it looks too cluttered with full comment posts and the only restriction on height is either pixels or articles (update – Matthias’ CSS hack works well enough for me but I’d still prefer a more elegant approach – no offense Matthias)

2. Comment moderation needs respecting. This is definitely an issue.

3. There doesn’t seem to be any inherent spam protection. Is this the case?

4. Threading in RSS – it would be useful to see threaded discussion appearing in RSS – matters where there is a lot of chatter around a specific posting.

The second one – respecting comment moderation is the most serious. Neville Hobson discusses this in detail here. Comment moderation is an essential feature to help prevent spam and to stop nutcases from dumping garbage onto your site. I moderate comments for exactly that reason. To give you an indication of the scale of problem, my anti-spam plug-in for this site has captured 298 spam comments since it was installed.

In the long term, I’m not sure whether I will keep CoComment on this site because it is a little untidy though I will definitely retain it in my RSS reader.

By the way – anyone who wants an invite code to try out this tool can get one from me by posting a comment. I reply to each person individually. I’ve got seven left so it’s first come, first served. If you are using it, I’d encourage you to post comments to the Forums so the developers can see what you think of it and can judge how best to improve it. You can always drop comments here as well.

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Tagged as: Innovation

  • http://blog.ch/ Matthias

    1. None taken. It’s just a temporary solution until the cocomment team can implement it. I’m sure there’s more pressing issues, they’re swamped with feature requests and bugfixing (not to mention server load).

    2. I disagree. I think it’s wonderful that we can bypass the “conversation nazis” and make our voice heard without his/her approval. In fact, we could create a whole little subculture around Comments That Were Never Posted.
    In my opinion there is no libel issue.

    3. I never thought of that. Big problem once the spammers figure it out. On the other hand, isn’t the whole thing javascript-based? A bot would have to understand javascript then (most of them don’t) and could still only “post” to its own Conversations page. To prevent the spam from appearing on your site, you could check “Show comments written by me only” (which arguably limits the usefulness of the box).

    4. RSS is too darned complicated already. Let’s find a way to syndicate NNTP instead. I mean it.

  • http://www.nevon.net/ Neville Hobson

    That’s my current thought, too, Dennis – maybe not display the comments on the site but definitely keep track via the RSS feed.

    To provide site visitors with the connection, maybe have a link to the conversation space on the coComment website. And a link to the feed.

    Overall, though, it’s a very neat concept.

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