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Skud, etc.Skud, etc.Posted Aug 28, 2009 20:45 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1)In reply to: Skud, etc. by Skud Parent article: FSF to host a mini-summit on Women in Free Software "The comment format here sucks" is put-down language. If you have constructive comments, we'd like to hear them. RSS feeds are listed over here. Yes, there is one for comments. There's also email notifications and the unread comments page, but those features (which cost us extra to provide) are reserved for our subscribers, who actually pay for this site to exist.
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Skud, etc. Posted Aug 28, 2009 20:58 UTC (Fri) by Skud (guest, #59840) [Link]
Here are my constructive comments:
1) A per-article comment RSS feed would be useful.
Charging extra for email notification is your prerogative, of course, but as it is not a paid feature on any other blog/social networking site/etc that I know of, the fact that you are charging for it kind of makes you stand out and I find it a disincentive to subscribe. I find myself thinking, "What? I have to PAY for such a basic thing? Forget it!"
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 28, 2009 21:03 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] The comments are useful. Per-article feeds have been requested before; I mostly just fear bogging down the server with requests for feeds from comment streams which haven't changed in years. RSS readers never seem to give up.Charging for anything makes us stand out. But thousands of people seem to think it's worth it.
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 28, 2009 21:05 UTC (Fri) by Skud (guest, #59840) [Link]
I don't know how big your subscriber base is, but it seems odd to me that RSS feeds bog you down when they don't for other large blogs.
Anyway. If you have enough subscribers who think it's worth paying for email notifications, more power to you. You don't need me :)
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 28, 2009 21:10 UTC (Fri) by Skud (guest, #59840) [Link]
Why don't you channel your main RSS feeds through feedburner.com? In addition to taking most of the load, it gives you some very useful stats about your readership.
Decent RSS readers have exponential backoff if feeds haven't changed lately. If people are using ill-behaved readers, block them. This will not block any of the major players.
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 28, 2009 22:35 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Unfortunately it will I think block Akregator 3.5.x, which is still heavily used by KDE users. That's probably bad for a Linux news site :/
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 29, 2009 11:36 UTC (Sat) by Skud (guest, #59840) [Link]
Good thing Akregator is open source, and that someone can fix it :)
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 29, 2009 22:06 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Akregator 3.5.x is also maintenance-dead. I very much doubt anyone will bother to add new features like this to it. (4.x is the New Thing but a lot of people haven't migrated yet.)
Skud, etc. Posted Sep 6, 2009 8:19 UTC (Sun) by mdz@debian.org (subscriber, #14112) [Link]
If the feed hasn't changed in ages, surely an IMS request to check if it
changed doesn't impose much load on the server?
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 28, 2009 21:04 UTC (Fri) by Skud (guest, #59840) [Link]
More...
UI-wise, some easier visual distinction between commenters might be useful, especially in long threads like this one where I am scanning to see what's going on. Many sites use Gravatar.com to provide commenters with distinctive user pictures, for example.
The amount of text on this line:
Posted Aug 28, 2009 20:47 UTC (Fri) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link]
Is overwhelming and hides the poster's name. Compare eg. the comment format used by Dreamwidth here: http://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/10630.html#comments
As you can see, it makes the names stand out more, and de-emphasises the timestamps etc. Note also the folding of long sub-threads.
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 28, 2009 21:14 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
by the way, there is a greasemoneky script that was created for lwn.net that pretties up the page, folds subthreads, etc. I don't use it so I can't give you pointers to it offhand, but that is an option.
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 28, 2009 21:20 UTC (Fri) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]
Heh. I didn't realize that Comments/unread was subscriber-only. Yeah. It would be very hard to follow this conversation without it.
Before Comments/unread was available someone made a greasemonkey script to highlight new comments in lwn threads. I used it for a while.
To be honest, though, this is an absurdly long thread for lwn.net. Most articles rarely breach 50 comments. And lwn.net isn't really a 'social networking' or 'community' site (I'd never pay for one).
It's primary purpose is as a news publication, and while it does do 'aggregation' and announcement publishing, the real value of the site comes from the in-depth articles they produce, by doing real reporting (interviewing people involved, digging through mailing lists, source files, changelogs, etc). Nobody else in our esoteric little community is doing anything like it, and it's what makes lwn.net worth paying for, imho.
Using avatars, etc. would be giving way too much importance to the comments section of the site, which like the 'aggregation service,' is a secondary component. Again, imho.
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 28, 2009 22:38 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Oh, gods, yes. I'd pay to turn avatars *off*. Horrible things.
I can recall no more than three or four LWN comment threads as long as this one. (Personally I find it more readable than, say, geekfeminism's comment formatting by a long chalk. It's very hard to figure out the nesting of comments on there, for me anyway.)
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 28, 2009 23:58 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
> Using avatars, etc. would be giving way too much
> importance to the comments section of the site
I don't like avatars myself, but I have to disagree with the idea that it's bad because it would be focussing too much on the comments. For me, it's the quality of comments that makes me follow LWN.
(Maybe giving each person an coloured mark would be good. It could be autogenerated based on their account number or a rolling-over number based on some numberised version of their login name. Maybe.)
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 29, 2009 22:09 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Instead of a coloured mark, just colour the title background mod their subscriber number. (For real utter O(n^2) overkill, hunt for a set of colours such that all individuals in a given conversation have an unchanging colour, and that all A->B->C response sequences use maximally distinct colours. ;) )
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 29, 2009 0:51 UTC (Sat) by maco (guest, #53641) [Link]
Subscriptions also get you access to articles earlier ;) Non-subscribers have to wait...Corbet, is it a week?...for some articles.
Also, Corbet's comment explains why I was going "huh? but it has 'email responses to me' right on the comment submit page!"
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 29, 2009 21:42 UTC (Sat) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
Corbet, I would be thrilled to have a way to jump to the parent posting of any comment. I often find myself putting the mouse cursor at left edge of comment and then scanning upwards looking for the first comment before that to identify its parent.
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 31, 2009 22:40 UTC (Mon) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
+1.
I'd also use this on reply screens, where the parent comment is given for reference, but then I realize I need to check something in the parent's parent...
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 31, 2009 22:43 UTC (Mon) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
Err, I'm a dork. Comment post pages *do* have that link ("In reply to:"), and I use it all the time. It'd be handy sometimes on main comment pages too. (Though probably shouldn't take up a whole line -- maybe a little "^" link that scrolls rather than opening a new page?)
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