Welcome Back Comments

Comments, yay! Goodness all around.

You know the improvement I liked best in thedailywtf.com? Featured Comments. If I was interested in the raw conversation, I could access that, but if all I wanted was the insightful stuff, the Featured Comments had it right there.

Although it doesn’t change the workload of moderation, content-wise this seems like the ideal situation for someone who supports the idea of the blog as a conversation. Instead of demoting what you consider “bad” comments, you instead promote “good” ones.

I’m glad that you are back, my only hope is that the quality of your post get’s better too, the last 3 months were terrible, it appears that with all your activity you have left CH behind.
Keep the good posts coming.

Juan Zamudio

So, you’re afraid of anonymous comments. How sad.

I’m certainly not a fan of the preponderance of trolls and morons who feel the urge to treat a discussion board as their own toilet, but it’s also quite possible to go too far in the other direction as well.

You’re in danger of making this into an echo chamber. Sure, simply being required to sign on isn’t going to suppress debate, in and of itself, but you’re choosing to throw out some insightful and intelligent discourse, merely because they choose to not sign in.

Yes, there are morons in that direction, but there can also be meaningful dialogue. However, with this attitude, you’re basically saying that just because someone prefers to remain anonymous, it means (falsely) that they must have nothing of value to offer to the community.

Maybe the real problem is that you don’t like it when your preconceptions are challenged (you’re going to claim that having a login only reduces trolls, but the trolls will be there, regardless, you just don’t like having J. Random Stranger tell you that you’re full of it.) From the last few postings where you had comments, I’m going to have to assume that you’ve taken offense at the idea that most of your commenters hate Markdown (and apparently, that pisses you off).

Login or not, you’re going to have to deal with disagreement, and even trolls. If you think this will allow you to moderate them, you’re just in denial (and even if you are able to moderate them, you could do just as well, whether logins were required, or not).

As to the idea that comments (especially anonymous ones) take away from the thrust of the original post, the only thing I can think to say about that is bullcrap. If your post stands on its own, and makes a clear and identifiable point, it won’t matter if there’s one or one thousand comments about it.

If you really want to manage comments, do it like Slashdot does. Allow all comments, have levels of visibility managed by a group of moderators (here you get around the issue of what one person can do). In lieu of that kind of moderation, the only thing that comes through clearly is that you’re utterly unwilling to accept the idea that people don’t agree with you.

Welcome to NZ.

In addition to excellent chocolate we have excellent coffee.

Avoid all Starbucks emplacements whilst in NZ and head for the local coffee shot for a decent shot of the good stuff. I’d start with a Flat White and see what you think of that.

Wellington is the best little city in the world. It might be wet and windy at times but it does have the big advantage of compactness so getting about in the centre is a breeze.

Any plans to visit the South Island this time around?

Comments aren’t back until Catto is.

Comments aren’t back until Catto is.
Amen to that! Hey now Catto!

Comment moderation may be a necessary evil at scale, but it can invite the (mis?)perception that disagreeable comments will be unjustifiably removed. One way to combat that perception is to allow viewing of moderated comments should the use choose to see them. Keep the pure spam out completely, but allowing comments that have been removed for reasons other than spam to be viewed optionally allows for a higher quality reading experience while preserving transparency.

Rod Sanders wrote:

Login or not, you're going to have to deal with disagreement, and even trolls. If you think this will allow you to moderate them, you're just in denial (and even if you are able to moderate them, you could do just as well, whether logins were required, or not).

If this is true, why do you care if anonymous comments are enabled or not?

Furthermore, what exactly do anonymous comments add?

Signed in with my openid and it’s saying I’m signed in as “Sam”, is that the name I’ll get in my signature or will it use my full name?
Finding out in 3…2…1…

hmm, it’s linking to a typepad account, and I could edit my display name in that. I’d have preferred it to link straight to my openid using my full name like wordpress did.

I dunno about this. The comment moderation systems out there, such as what the iPhone Dev team use, slashdot, and so on. The best and the worst get filtered to their respective levels, while making it all open for the end user.

I mean, http://intensedebate.com/ has the problems you bring up figured out already.

It even has a Typepad support built in.

The fact is that just about any system is better than the editor doing everything clandestine, deciding what is a shrill and what isn’t.

  1. What cant we use our stack overflow accounts? openId wouldn’t accept my account or my provider url to sign in :frowning:

  2. Why can’t we just up/down vote items like we do on stack overflow?

Jeff, why don’t you develop stack-overlow-like plugin for blogs, which lets people vote for comments and other stuff we’re used to on Stack Overflow (maybe a bit more limited)? Seems that there is a need.

I like it when anonymous comments are off because it reduces the effects of John Gabriel’s Greater Internet ****wad Theory. Doesn’t block ****wads entirely, but hey.

If this is true, why do you care if anonymous comments are enabled or not?

Furthermore, what exactly do anonymous comments add?

Oh, I’m sorry. Was the concept of anonymity something that made your brain hurt?

To say it in simple terms (hope it helps you), the problem with just scuttling anonymous comments is that it doesn’t actually do what the the banning party thinks it will.

Yeah, it may decrease some of the more eggregious moron spew, 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’.

On the other hand, for a number of reasons (and, yes, those reasons can be valid), some people just like to be anonymous online. 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 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.

On StackOverflow I don’t have to remember my OpenId URL, but on this site it asks the URL (I didn’t notice the provider buttons). It is case sensitive, too, needs to be written in lower case. On StackOverflow it isn’t.

Anyway, adding signing in reduces the amount of people who comment, because there is an extra step. If you have never signed in, you also need to register a new account. Sure OpenId and such make it easier as you can sign in to many places with it, but there is the extra step anyway. Coding Horror has lots of readers who already use these sign in methods, so it isn’t that much of a hindrance though.

But in internet in general, people browse sites and the next site is just a click away. If you would have to register on one site, people might think again and click away instead of registering.

Then again, I think people expect something in return for registering. Voting of comments would be nice and gathering reputation. Otherwise logging in feels just like some bureaucracy that takes time.

Welcome back, indeed!

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 :slight_smile:

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 :slight_smile:

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