I’m more leaning towards staying with the original site, but abandoning the comments community.
I really dislike not having nested comments, and it seriously ****es me off to have to log in to my (involuntarily) linked gmail account to post, because Discourse refuses to let me log in any other way.
Both of those results seem based on individual article impressions on average, not the the percentage of visitors, right? In other words–yeah, on a given article the average is that 5-8% see its comments. But it’s (likely) not the SAME 5-8% of your visitors on each of those articles. Not many (certainly not me) scroll down on every article. I’m a 100% viewer of some comments each visit, but I view comments on only a small percentage of articles.
In fact–pulling a number out of my ass here–I’d say I view comments on about, um, 1/4th of the posts. If everyone was like me, (and I conveniently ignore overlap. And air friction.) that would mean the 5-8% article average translates to 20-32% of people regularly seeing -some- comments.
OK, overlap is a factor, but at the same time, that 1/4th number I extracted from myself is likely a much smaller fraction in reality, too. Its hard to estimate but I don’t think I scroll down on even a quarter of them, but I pretty much always do on some on a given boing boing visit. So, my average per article would be very low. My average per visit would be very high.
Have to admit, this whole thing seems more "boing boing"ish now that I see Antinous posting again.
^ this times eleventy billion
The big question is, will the all-seeing avatar be back sometime soon? (cc: @Antinous)
A true optimist wouldn’t see the glass as half full, of course. They would think: “Ooooh! A glass! And it has something in it!!”
Why are the comments closed on the “US intel chief James Clapper: I didn’t lie about spying program, I just gave an “erroneous” answer” article? Intention or Mistake?
Yes, it was (IIRC) percentage of page views as a whole. Most visitors only visit one or two pages, though. The average is something like 3 or 4, though, thanks to a minority who visit many pages.
Good point that more people will read comments, just not on every article.
Now we’ll be able to do very easy analytics on that 
Yeah, @Antinous, how about an avatar? 
Xeni was waiting for my comment.
Not while it requires signing up for Gravatar.
Give us a few more weeks @zogstrip is working on it very soon.
Had a feelin’ that was it! Will just keep on diggin’ the lavender-slate snowflake till then.
I’ve worked hard on terrorizing the internet under multiple identities.
If the blue dot means “comments since last read”, what, please, does the grey dot mean?
Blue means new and unread. Grey means not-new and unread.
I have that show up occasionally in older threads that I’ve clearly been through. Not sure why. If someone edits a post ex post facto, does that generate a gray dot?
I know absolutely nothing about building a website, but can someone explain to me why someone would think it was useful to switch* to a different URL every time I scroll past a post? Scrolling through this topic would result in nearly 500 URLs in my browser history that begin with Introducing BBS, our new forums If I am searching for something in my browser history, it adds a lot of useless junk to go through.
*I assume “switch” is a better word than “load”, because I noticed that if you read to the bottom of a topic and then scroll to see new comments as they appear, you will get new URLs but I do not think that you can see that a comment has a “reply” unless you actually press “reload” on your browser.
No – the typical way to get gray numbers is to start reading a large topic long enough for it to be tracked (depends on how your user preferences are set, but out of the box, 4 minutes), then stop reading somewhere in the middle.
Now you have some unread, not-new posts (grey) in that topic – and if new replies come in, they are unread, new replies (blue).
Why was it controversial? I vaguely remember that some people were annoyed by it, but I cannot remember why. The only thing that I can think is that it makes it harder to find unread posts. If that was true, then I suppose it would be ideal (from the user’s perspective) if comments were threaded with new comments clearly marked somehow.
I am kind of curious if threading led to better discussion (subjective, I know) or more comments.
I wonder if that changed any (better or worse) after threaded comments?
Commenting and visiting, not the same thing.
Visitors define the popularity, count them, and that’s how popular the site is.
Commenters add something too, but the value of that something isn’t equal to or greater than what’s being added to, which is a popular site. Subjectively it may seem that nuggets of wisdom, context, or comedy added later are the whole key to the thing… But who are you or I to say for sure! Guests is who.
So, buy it or not, ownership has its privileges
