I dunno man, the whole “mysterious algorithm to rank comments” thing feels like an exercise in monetizing/mining/productising the comments, which feels a bit counter to the percieved free speech ethos of BB.
I totally get it, but in some ways it would have felt like a more gutsy statement to just say "you know what, comments suck. Let’s just not have them. Like the @AvoidComments twitter would say “nothing good ever came from reading the comments”.
(actually the fun is all in making the comments)
Meanwhile, Discourse feels a lot like something that escaped prematurely from a secret twitter/facebook cross breeding lab. (Don’t worry though, I’ll try to provide useful feedback and have already forked the repo on github! Need to have a go at Ruby.)
Your comments are our learning experience / Jeff Atwood’s unpaid QA team ;D
Not sure if anyone else is seeing this, but comment threading appears way weird for me (using Firefox 22.0, incidentally).
Top-level comments have the reply count below them, and you can expand the reply count to see those replies - so far so good. But, the replies also appear further downthread, I guess chronologically? So, unless a comment is a top-level post, it shows up twice in the thread.
If that’s the intended behaviour, I guess I’ll start getting used to it, but it’s certainly a departure from most forum layouts…
Incidentally, I really really like he side-by-side editing and preview - no more forgetting to close my <blink> tags…
The developers of Discourse and Discord will make oblique disparaging reference to one another on the projects’ respective ‘about’ pages. Everyone but the few dozen people who know about the project internal politics that led to the fork will find the ‘about’ pages oddly disconcerting withoug being able to pin the feeling on anything in particular.
Oh, also, quick question - is image posting actually ever going to work for the average user? I mean, the potential for abuse seems too great TBH, but it’s really annoying to have carefully stolen an amusing gif from the tumblr of a much more talented individual, upload it and then be told you can’t post images. Can we just not let new users press the “insert image” button? I didn’t care about images in posts until I thought I could do it and then was told I couldn’t!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off to update my collection of reddit-style first world problem meme jpegs. I expect all my UI quibbles to be sorted by, say, tomorrow evening? That’s reasonable, right? There might be another zero bucks in it for you!
The algorithm is a digg/reddit/slashdot type thing–it counts likes/upvotes and looks at who they’re from, then automatically promotes the top-scored posts.
Our early inclination was to hand-pick only, but we’re interested in how smart the Discourse comment-picking AI BRAIN is and want to see how it goes.
“You know what, comments suck. Let’s just not have them”
This was indeed the plan at the beginning, when we looked at Discourse and realized how much better it would be than plain old comments. If adding selected comments to the original post doesn’t work out for us editorially, or becomes a continual source of confusion or frustration for readers, then we might still go that way.
The forums don’t feel ‘real Boing Boing’ yet because they’re new, but the center of gravity could shift here pretty quickly IMO in any case.
It certainly is interesting! Atwood’s take on social discourse makes for interesting reading too, even though I’m not sure if he’s some sort of evil mastermind.
A worthy experiment, I’ll applaud you guys for that! Plus, maybe I’ll learn how to make my own facebook knockoff in a few weeks.
[Imagines own, personal facebook clone, with only one user… ]
I KNOW, I’LL CALL IT… “FACEBLOG”! OMG GET ME A VC FUND STAT! ;D
I’d like a way to, at the top of the main index page or front door or whatever we call it, I’d like to be able to see hottest/most active threads. Sort by new, “hot/active,” and maybe a third thing. category.
I’d settle for a “load everything”-button that also disables infinite scrolling. (Especially upwards, which is annoying and seems prone to loading+scrolling running all the way to the top no matter my input).
I’ve rarely read a comment thread on BB that would benefit from all this complexity. Sure, I don’t love Disqus, but I don’t love Discourse yet either.
I will say that I’ve always disliked the commenting system on slashdot where certain comments get upvoted but I recognize that its a way of dealing with such a large amount of comments on every post, It seems completely unnecessary for BB though.
Please, no auto unloading and loading of the comments, I can’t scroll through the comments if they’re not loaded in my browser. I “Passionately dislike” this.
Oh and I’m pretty sure I registered with Discourse yesterday but now I find that I had to register with bbs.boinboing.net?
I honestly hoped this was a telnet bbs. I even pulled my old Amiga out of the closet and tried to telnet to bbs.boingboing.net for like fifteen minutes before I decided to read the announcement post more closely.
