Okay, so I have a few solid suggestions:
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Put a permalink to the boingboing,net article being discussed somewhere other than the very tippy top of the discussion page. For extremely long discussions, scrolling up is a gigantic pain (especially because comments are dynamically loaded). People are dissuaded from checking the context of the original article and staying on topic. There should be a permalink in the header that follows you down the page.
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More categories. Right now it’s BoingBoing, Meta, and everything else. It’s not really a BBS. If it’s just some more convoluted dedicated comment system, why the hell separate it from the posts anyway? If that’s what it’s supposed to be, then comments should just be integrated into the post pages. The extra step makes no sense.
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More stabbiness. I yearn for the days of disemvowelment. There’s a broken windows element to this: if people see really crappy comments left standing, then the quality of their comment is going to suffer because the standards seem lower. Enforce civility. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t insult each other, but we should hold an insult to the standard of “clever and entertaining.”
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Buy me a pony. Except not really, I don’t want to muck anything. Send me money to buy myself something of equivalent niceness to a pony. (Hey it’s worth a shot.)
