| How user comments should work on the Web |
| Written by Rick Silva |
| Saturday May 14, 2011 |
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The folks at Mojo are looking for ideas on making the Web work better for journalism sites. Mojo is a partnership between the Knight Foundation and Mozilla. For you etymologists out there, Mojo = Mozilla + Journalism. Mojo's current focus is on user commenting. Here are my thoughts on the way commenting should work on the Web: Any sensible commenting system indents responses Reading the comments on The Boston Herald's site, for example, is maddening. You see a banner there that says "RedSoxFan replying to Andy" and then RedSoxFan's comment: "You got that right!" The problem is that the reader has no idea what Andy's original point was. RedSoxFan's reply is on page 27 of the comments and there is no post by Andy on that page. So, assuming the moderator didn't delete Andy's post, it must reside somewhere on the previous 26 pages of comments. But where? At this point the reader has to decide whether it is worth hunting for Andy's original comment or not. The reader has no idea whether to give RedSoxFan a thumbs up or a thumbs down, because he has no idea what RedSoxFan thinks Andy is right about. This is no way for human beings to communicate. The indented approach is far better: Andy RedSoxFan Now the reader can understand what is being said. (He may be concerned for humanity, but at least he understands the discussion). Now that the reader understands what is going on, he can jump in and participate in the discussion by replying to either Andy's comment or to RedSoxFan's. This need for indented comments creates an interesting technical hurdle Stan
This could go on for quite some time... Typically, web designers don't object to vertical scrolling. If a page has a lot of content, users don't mind scrolling down to see what's at the bottom. But it is frowned upon to have a lot of horizontal scrolling. Typically, users don't want to scroll left and right. But for comments, a large scroll area running from left to right is perfectly valid - and is preferable to making the user click a link or use other navigational controls. From a technical standpoint, the question becomes "what is the best way to help the user navigate very wide screens". Of course the horizontal scroll bar and left and right arrows are available, but it would be far better if the user could simply drag the screen left and right. This is far more intuitive and useful. The new Drag and Drop functionality of HTML5 has been much-ballyhooed, but for comments, all we really need is the Drag - and it should work for the entire screen. The user should be able to click on the screen and simply drag it left or right to see all the fascinating towel-related comments. While we're at it, let's allow the user to drag the screen up and down as well on comment pages. Preventing curse words Typically, the user types his comment and clicks the submit button. The best way to prevent swearing in comments is to nip it right in the bud. When the user types a word on the no-no list, disable (grey out) the submit button, highlight the offending word, and display a message to the user explaining that the word is not allowed and they better straighten out and fly right or their mother will wash their mouth out with soap. The HTML might look like this: Most forums already maintain a list of naughty words that could be used for this purpose. Low value comments The best use of this data is to display the vote total for the comment, and use it to sort among other comments at the same hierarchical level. In this example, the comment responses at level 2 are ordered by votes, not by timestamp: Original Commentor +4 Brilliant Responder +22 It doesn't matter who responded first. The best comments at that level of the hierarchy should rise to the top. Some sites put too much value on the vote total data, for example, hiding comments below a certain threshold. This is a bad idea because it not only squelshes dumb posts, but also good ideas that are unpopular. The best approach is to display all comments, but display insightful comments more prominently. IP Addresses with multiple forum accounts should be allowed, but noted This would not prevent a user from posting from a library or other public place, but it would alert the community when a user is posting under multiple accounts. Users should be allowed - and encouraged - to delete old accounts to remove the message. The message should only show the number of active accounts associated with the IP address. When voting on the comments of others, there should be only one vote allowed per IP address. Those are my comments about comments. Please leave a comment. ;-) |
