I can’t wait for the next version… Discord.
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It appears I can’t change my avatar without a Gravatar AND Wordpress account. Nice. Real nice.
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You could not comment from the Boing Boing front page before. You had to jump to the permalink to see and interact with Disqus. It is however an additional step and while we aren’t doing anything today, we hear you.
Yeah, I agree. It’s a little odd to not have in-page commenting.
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This is the specific thing we’ve chosen not to do anymore, I’m afraid, for good or for bad. We like the idea of a relatively independent (and relatively permissive) discussion zone – here – from which a selection of the best comments are offered to readers of the main blog.
I do like the idea of more integration between comment threads and the original post, but it has to be very selective and carefully tailored.
For example, a “discourse like” button on the post, or perhaps for specific promoted comments, would be very neat. But only if it can be built in a way that isn’t a mess under the hood.
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It’s actually pretty remarkable how many seemingly large issues there are with this. It doesn’t seem ready for launch.
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You can’t comment directly on a story. Clicking twice to comment seems like it would be a huge turn off for most people.
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It’s unusable on mobile, which has to be a large percentage of your viewership.
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When commenting half the screen is blocked by this odd input field that shows my text twice.
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Why does Boing Boing want my friends list when I try to log in via Facebook?
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Comment systems work best when everyone’s voice is heard and users recieve the satisfaction of seeing their thoughts. Controlling comments via author choices and a mysterious algorithm seems designed to turn people off from leaving comments.
What was wrong with disqus? It worked quickly and easily when I used it.
All I can think of is that perhaps Boing Boing didn’t like having a large amount of comments on their stories?
Might I suggest that you bring back a usable commenting system that’s similar to what other sites use and then create a new forum that’s standalone? This seems to be a Frankenstein creation that combines some of the worst of both.
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So my old screen name is truncated… but maybe the long Name field covers this up… about to see. (follow-up: BLEH)
Bleh! I say bleh! And I also say bleh to the 20 character minimum. Looks all feature rich and stuff, but still: bleh!
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OK after some puttering around here’s some thoughts.
How lightweight is this software and could i run it from a raspberry pi using a piratebox setup?
Why Can i not add comments directly from articles?
Any chance at some games? (doubtful but never know)
Maybe Its just me but I’m having a hard time navegating anything that isn’t ‘new posts’. Then again could just be too use to php based boards.
Yeah, I’m dead set against the character minimum. What’s up with that??
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“You can’t comment directly on a story.”
This is by design. 
“It’s unusable on mobile”
Top priority! Hopefully this can be mostly fixed with stylesheet changes; if not, it’ll be down to Discourse’s development schedule.
“Why does Boing Boing want my friends list when I try to log in via Facebook?”
I think it’s part of the auth token system Facebook has, and which Discourse uses to log you in that way. We don’t actually have any interest in or access to your Facebook info at Boing Boing.
“Comment systems work best when everyone’s voice is heard and users recieve the satisfaction of seeing their thoughts. Controlling comments via author choices and a mysterious algorithm seems designed to turn people off from leaving comments.”
Forums are a freer environment than you’ve ever had at BB itself, with the ability to create your own threads. If being heard and seeing one’s thoughts is the goal, this is certainly the way forward.
But you’re right that not every voice will be published on Boing Boing’s own posts anymore. This is, it must be pointed out, the way it’s always been in practice.
Given that, this new setup, focusing on public forums instead of relatively restrictive inline comments, will hopefully make for an interesting balance: chaos here, curation there.
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I don’t like it either. I just paste in “Post must be at least 20 characters long.” to defeat it!
EDIT: Comment length is now minimal. Be good.
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Blech.
I always hate change, but this is a real PIA. I always like reading the comments because there are some really interesting and informed commenters on BoingBoing, but I don’t want to read half a thread, so now I have to open twice as many tabs - and since most of my browsing is via mobile, and this (currently) sucks even worse than Disqus for mobile, it’s even worse.
It might be by design, but I think it’s a sucky design.
How about, instead of having the comments inline on the article page, ALL OF the text from the article is the first post on each forum thread? (that way, I could just read bbs.boingboing.net and stop reading the main page?)
Thanks, Obama!
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Can I suggest then that the speech bubble icon on the boing boing main page links straight to the article comment page, rather than the full article. As it currently stands, clicking on either the headline or the speechbubble (which is now missing the comment counter. Broken? Removed?) takes you to the top of the article page. Seems a little redundant.
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We’re doing what with the what now?
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I think that’s a great suggestion and will do that asap.
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Why is letting people comment directly on stories a bad thing?
Not complaining, just curious.
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This is a site setting, if you guys prefer shorter posts its up to you. We just try to recommend sane defaults.
I’m just very glad to have gotten this username before it was snapped up by anyone else.
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