Do you not think that maybe what’s causing some of these problems is attempting to produce one platform to facilitate both of these purposes?
It feels a lot like two different systems are required - even if they’re in some way integrated.
Ah but that’s a bit of a red herring. When I first started using BB it was limited to a single secondary nesting - and I remember being frustrated with that, as others were. Eventually it went full nested and people stopped complaining (although I appreciate some weren’t a fan of Disqus itself). Having used Disqus 2012 it also fixed a lot of the issues with Disqus (including a lack of mobile support).
The only time I don’t remember people complaining about nesting is when we had it. Maybe that’s a confirmation bias on my part though.
[Edit: Actually I will admit that the crazy nesting that happened occasionally was a bit mad, when you ended up with 10px wide comments 
- but as you’ll have seen in my comments above I’m not totally for or against - I do appreciate that there’s a better solution out there]
I have been trying to come to terms with this for years.
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If you are going this way, you really, really need the content to only
be one click away. The REAL content
You are so right. This is the single, specific problem that we (as a very small group of people with little time to deal with technology in general) have. And it goes way beyond the relationship between BB and BBS.
And it comes down to this principle: When a post at BB is just a link to content elsewhere, it should NOT generate links to anything EXCEPT that content. The one exception: links to discussion threads at BBS.
• Short items on the BB homepage should link directly to BBS threads, not to their own permalink (which doesn’t offer any extra text)
• Our auto-tweets go to our own permalinks, but often they should go directly to the site that the BB post – which is usually just one sentence or two itself – links to.
• Short items should be included in full at BBS, as OPs. There’s a strange know-it-when-we-see-it balance to be struck, here, that works for us and for you.
The “vision” we have, such as it is, is that BB is an editorial project that was always a very weak community platform. BBS is a better community platform that will – once we get it right – feel like home to all of us. And BB then becomes, simply put, the best of it.
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The way I envisage it is that awesome OPs get excerpted/posted in full on BB’s homepage, and you click through to BBS the read the discussion.
It does reintegrate editorial and commentary (because the BBS thread then feels like an ‘editorial permalink,’ I guess) but it was never a black and white thing. I would be concerned, though, about it making stuff more confusing in general.
Ah I see.
Now that’s something that I can buy into. Admittedly I was blinded by the trees there. Taking the extra step out of a different part of the journey.
I think my knowledge of click-through worth on blogs might have fogged that a little. But I appreciate every audience interacts slightly different with monetization.
As long as it doesn’t harm the business then I’d be onboard with that, and I see now why you were drawing a comparison to reddit.
I don’t think there would be any confusion as long as the call to action were clear.
One solution that I’ve always been curious to see tried somewhere is to have the system (whatever system it is) recognize when two or three authors are just responding to each other. Because that’s a conversation, instead of showing the replies nested present them in some kind of chat format.
A solution that I’ve actually seen in use is to give each comment its own perma-link, and when that link is used that comment become the top-level comment displayed, so that the nesting of everything below it gets re-set back to the left of the screen.
From one of the other threads I’ve seen mention of using the z-access to allow replies to branch towards or away from the user, but that’s a little non-intuitive. Or maybe I’m mis-remembering the user who wanted to see replies actually stacked to the right.
Another idle wonder of mine is if color-coding the posts, a la Internet Explorer’s tabs, could be useful.
Rob, maybe it would help the conversation if we could agree on some terms, and see some examples, of the various kinds of posts on BoingBoing. For instance, I had no idea that some of the posts on the BB main page were auto-tweets and wouldn’t know how to point to one if you asked me to.
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Autotweets are things tweeted automatically when we post to BB.
The problem is that these tweets point back to Boing Boing, when in many cases they should link to the thing we were linking to from Boing Boing.
When our tweets link to BB, that’s good when our BB post has some meat to it – opinion, reaction, original reflections, whatever.
But when we’re just writing a sentence or two linking to, say, a New York Times article, then our tweet should, too. It’s hard to automate this, though.
Likewise, if a post on the boing boing homepage is very short, there’s no point linking from it to a permalink (which won’t have anything else on it), and then from the permalink to the BBS thread. It should go straight from BB Homepage > BBS thread
Would it be possible to add on to the publishing back end a simple check box for “Link direct to content” so that it can be at the poster’s discretion? I’m thinking that between the half dozen or so boingboing posters that wouldn’t be too much of a hardship, and it would certainly be more accurate than, say, and arbitrary word limit on what links to the content and what links to the BB post ABOUT the content
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That sums it up perfectly. Alas.
I am reminded of
{incredibly rude / offensive thing}… no offense or anything!
If only there were a more constructive way for you to express your “opinion”.
Anyway, I suggest you read @beschizza’s replies above which are quite informative. I don’t think we’ve had that level of detail in replies yet, and they go directly toward the topic as defined in the title, whereas our flat vs. threaded stuff, as scintillating as it may be, doesn’t.
Click here to filter the topic to just Rob’s posts – which you could also do manually by:
- Clicking the topic title to move to the top (also possible by clicking the navigational arrow at the bottom right)
- Expand the topic map
- Click on Rob’s avatar
We originally had some hover actions on the user avatar in the left gutter to do things like filter by user – but those are untenable in tablets / touch devices which are a primary target for Discourse, so we dropped them until we could figure it out.
The touch-interface will be mature when it recognizes a hovering finger. I have pondered this now for awhile.
PLEASE don’t include hover functions! I cant stand it when i get boxes popping up because i happen to have left my mouse in just the wrong place. Everything should be based ona possitive action like a click or a wheel scroll
Alt text is a hover function that is critical is some cases (not mentioning XKCD) But the abuse by advertisers is very annoying. (edited to add a mention of tool tips, which are also useful.)
I just wanted to say that though I’ve been out of the conversation for the last few days (I won’t depress you with the particular stresses of my “holiday” weekend, but they kept me offline), I’m pretty darned pleased with where it has ended up. After a frustrating beginning, plenty of information has emerged that strikes me as good news. In what I hope to be my final word on flat vs threaded, now that context is expandable in both ways to show roots and branches, I’ve made my peace with the relative flatness of BBS. I would not like a completely flat system, but that’s because I really like the sidetracks and digressions we’re so good at around here, and I think you guys are forging a pretty good compromise that so far seems to be improving with every tweak.
As for the original point of @NathanHornby’s OP, I’m glad you offered your insight, @beschizza. It’s true that I don’t see a problem with inline comments, myself. I’m just an ordinary user who tries to comment in good faith; the failings of inline comments are probably more obvious to an actual blogger rather than little old non-blogging me. But I am heartened to see that you recognize the problems with keeping BB and BBS too completely separate from each other. And when you wrote this: [quote=“beschizza, post:97, topic:8634”]
Consider – one thing we’ve thought of is moving BB blogging into Discourse, using Wordpress only for features. And the front door of BB then becomes largely a selection of links to the best/hottest BBS threads. In this case, the BB editors become BBS OPs just like everyone else–we’d just have the privilege of autopromotion back to BB’s front page
[/quote]
…it reminded me that you do in fact, value what we dweebs in the peanut gallery have to say. That is, when we say anything remotely valuable. Which can occasionally happen. Now and then.
So thank you very much for that.
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The thing is, how would an automatically-generated tweet script even know what link? It’ll be in the post content somewhere. We’ll probably regex it out, but it’s a surprisingly difficult challenge.
Of course we chose what we wanted. Why would be choose something we didn’t want?
As a software engineer there are points where I choose things I didn’t personally want because of input from users, input from UX experts, or input from other sources where I have to put myself aside and listen. In this conversation Atwood wasn’t listening, he was self justifying. The system at this point has gross UX problems with regular user feedback being dismissed instead of heard because the design is what you want.
UX specifics are changing over time, and I don’t think that was the context of the remark you responded to, which I’ll repeat:
This commenting system wasn’t chosen because it’s the most
appropriate. It was chosen because you wanted it. That much is
obvious.
Obviously, when it comes to decisions about what system our own website runs on, we’re going to follow our own preferences. It’s insatiably entitled to think we’d do otherwise – and, to put it bluntly, there are relatively few complaints given the volume of discussion and traffic.
That said, we’re obviously in this thread (which could not have existed before BBS) to listen–otherwise we’d just ignore it.
