Glad to have the comments back. I’m with the crowd suggesting self-moderation + threaded conversations. I really think that would end a lot of the problems you’ev mentioned…
Hi Jeff! Good to see comments back 
I want to join all the people wishing you and your family a safe trip. And I want to add that I hope that we will see your dancing performance afterwards
I came here to say the same thing as Steve Mayne. I usually read Coding Horror in an RSS reader and have to make a conscious decision to come look at the comments for a given article, which I do about 5-10% of the time.
Hey Now Jeff,
Your comments on backups & clouds are interesting. As always, Thx 4 the info!
Coding Horror Fan,
Catto
Glad to have you (and comments) back!
Did I make a mistake at the first time or what? The signing in URL has to have upper case letter in it too, lower case didn’t work.
No, I tried it again. It just doesn’t work at the first time. Having Silvercode in it or silvercode doesn’t matter. It gives error message at first login, then I login again and I use the same URL and then it works.
Authenticated with my google credentials without a problem.
I personally like seeing who starts or continues a flame war so I know who to ignore. Constructive criticism or alternative points of view are always appreciated, but name calling and sarcasm is just pointless. This is not the correct venue for such behavior.
Listened to you and Joel discussing your Kiwiland trip. Now I also have to go there and drive around both islands.
Ideas on comment moderation:
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Allow people with at least 2,000 points on stackoverflow to comment unmoderated. (or some other number of points)
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Allow threading, and allow respondee to moderate respondor, with notification.
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Allow people with 10,000 stack overflow points to moderate other people’s comments. (they won’t want to screw you lest they lose access to SO.)
… Wait, use the Stackoverflow system as a blogging engine, and allow people to post their blog with it, including yours. I know I’d like that better than my current blogging platform.
@Chris_mahan interesting idea, but it seems to me like a blog has entirely different load and scaling characteristics than a QA forum. It doesn’t seem to me like there’d be quite as much code reuse as you seem to be implying.
+1 for the threaded comments, voting, and community moderation (lifehacker.com style)
As things stand right now, you’ve got multiple folks saying the same thing over and over again because there’s too many comments for them to go through and see if it’s already been said or not. With threaded comments you’ll at least have some amount of grouping that’ll help prevent redundancy
@Chris mahan: That’s a nice idea (using SO as a method to verify more trusted opinions). I wonder if it would be possible to expose some of the information from Stack Overflow for bloggers to use as a metric. Maybe authenticating against matching openid credentials?
Interesting…
@Rod Sanders:
Yeah, it may decrease some of the more eggregious moron spew
Which is Jeff’s stated goal.
but strangely enough, experience shows that the more committed morons are willing to sign in (usually using a temporary identity), because it gives them great pleasure to participate in the ‘Greater internet fuckwad theory’.
Which causes said committed morons to spend more time and energy to spew their worthless thoughts here. I’m sure that for some percentage of these types, such an expenditure of their time and energy presents a large enough barrier that they will give up before even trying, which is, again, one of Jeff’s stated goals.
On the other hand, for a number of reasons (and, yes, those reasons can be valid), some people just like to be anonymous online.
Nothing wrong with that.
And, though it might be too much for those suffering from a debilitating deficit of neurons to understand, many of these people actually do have something useful to contribute to the conversation.
Simply having something useful to contribute to a conversation is not good enough; They must also have enough desire and will power to actually contribute. Those anonymously useful contributors that fade back into the ether of anonymity at the first sight of a login prompt clearly prove that their useful contribution does not rise above the level of effort required to type in an id and a password in order to contribute said useful contribution. By their own inaction, they prove that their useful contribution isn’t really all that useful.
Simply put (in deference to you), a policy of moderation actually works much better than a simple strict policy of exclusion.
Perhaps in the academic world of theory, moderation works better. But in the real world, and applying this to comments on a blog, moderation would increase Jeff’s workload. Why should Jeff be forced to spend more of his time and energy deleting worthless comments just so that anonymous people can generate said worthless comments easier? That makes no sense.
The only people who think a straight mechanism of exclusion is valid are those who feel the desire to shape the course of the discussion,
Or, those who wish to spend less energy cleaning up the messes of those who feel the desire to create said messes.
rather than accept that there might be some validity in the opinions of others.
Having a valid opinion is like having a…belly button. (ahem) You may have a beautiful one, but that doesn’t mean everyone wants to see it.
Remember one thing: This is Jeff’s blog/website. He’s in control. He sets the rules. If his rules don’t bother you, you’re more than welcome to participate. If, however, his rules do bother you, go build your own blog/website, set your own rules, write your own entries, attract your own set of followers, and have fun moderating all the comments. No one’s stopping you!
I am a big fan of requiring logins for online discussions. I’ve seen way too many poo-flinging anonymousii on newspapers and blogs.
The truth is that there’s a point where noise drowns out signal. Veto-style moderation is one way to filter out the noise. Stackoverflow and Slashdot both have a system to filter out noise that works OK.
Imagine 4chan. Anonymity is a big factor in the /b/tard phenomenon. Do we want the whole internet 4channed?
I say no. For professional communication, let’s use our real names. Let’s sign what we say, and stand behind what we say. Let’s take responsibility for our words.
“Simply put (in deference to you), a policy of moderation actually works much better than a simple strict policy of exclusion. The only people who think a straight mechanism of exclusion is valid are those who feel the desire to shape the course of the discussion, rather than accept that there might be some validity in the opinions of others.”
Yeah, sure unless you’re a real human being and not an internet punching bag who wants to fritter his life away policing internet morons trying to shout him down on his own blog.
With one click of a checkbox he’s shaved a dozen (unpaid) hours off of his workweek. Want to present a differing opinion? Get your own blog and use it to express yourself. Crybaby.
I am really a fan of your blog & have also started a blog inspired by your blog.
Why typepad? why not wordpress??
Why the heck typepad creates my profile page as soon as I login (openid) here to comment. I dont need http://profile.typepad.com/thejeshgn
Any idea how can I avoid it?
Typepad is actually kind of nice, but what language is it made in? Can you easily implement comments for anything? As a spare time project i’ve been developing a very basic blog system/cms for my own blog (which has no content yet), because i believe half the fun lies in the development of things. I’ve been thinking of ways to allow people to log onto my site using twitter, facebook and openid. But it turns out combining all these into one is not very easy when you are the only person doing a project. A system like Typepad makes things like this easy, because it enables basically the entire world to comment on articles and posts without having to sign up. Allowing you to benefit from Twitter and Facebooks massive userbase.
How do you feel Typepad works for you, contrary to your old comment system ? I’m assuming it wasn’t all that hard to implement.
Scratch that, I was assuming TypePad was just a comment system, much like Discus or IntenseDebate, but it seems not. Doesn’t really fit in when making your own piece of software then.
A lot of comment systems have voting, but all of them suck.
The problem is sure you can up/down vote comments, but they keep the comments ordered by date of post. Some even go as far as make their comment system threaded which is even worst! So what if this box is shifted to the right? How many levels of indentation is it? I don’t even know what was the original comment this sub comment is referring to as its off screen.
Given all these problems I say just do what Stackoverflow does and just use one level for the comment and another for sub comments. But formatted the same as as not to show all the sub comments. Also make the comments sorted by number of votes. This will prevent epic long comment to comment chains. This is starting to sound a lot of just a direct adaption of stackoverflow for blogs and you probably have a spin off product there!
You’ve gone so far with stackoverflow why not take all the existing blogging software? I’d up vote that.
Going one step further, what if you created a site to replace blogger.com type sites? You could have authors with their own page and have each post voteable globally vs all post from all authors on the site. It would be a great opportunity for you to eat your own dog food. Everybody who has an open id account can start commenting and blogging.
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