Someone has ambitions to be a real journalist and thinks (or has been told) that comments on an article do not look professional.
In my view, BoingBoing is less for the lack of skepticism represented by the comments. Even the comment count on the main page reflected some level of community judgment.
Now we have a group of individuals pushing their pet notions without that filter. It may be the BB you want, but it isn’t the BB I grew to trust and look forward to.
Changing the link from the BB main page comment bubble to come directly here is a big improvement. Thank you for that change, I think it goes a long way to fixing what I initially didn’t like.
The forum software itself is pretty nifty, a few little things I do not like, but overall it really shows a lot of dedication to forum/bbs software and a big effort to make real improvements on the typical forum software. Kudos.
I really can not understand what you are trying to say, especially in your last paragraph.
It’s a complicated and obfuscatory response to the whole dialogue here. I don’t feel inclined to elaborate. It is funny, because I made your comment about the bubble link a few days ago. I do like the forum, but I am a bit of an asshole. Can’t seem to help myself. Things eat at me and then at some point my guard drops enough that I go and say the thing nobody wants said. Blort. Sometimes I manage to fool myself into making it obscure. It doesn’t really help.
No, I can elaborate on that last paragraph. I looked at BB for years thinking that some of the posts were there to encourage commentary from the crowd. They are usually posts about something controversial presented without comment. Cory, especially, likes to make posts like that. My feeling was that things were presented to elicit a critical discussion. Frequently commenters would ask Cory why he supported such a thing and I always thought he wasn’t. He was asking for a consensus to be formed or explored. This is why I loved BB. Smart people making contributions to the culture in the spirit of open discussion and democratic principles.
Now it seems like many other blogs. A platform for a select group to push their individual agendas. Disagreement and critical inquiry for the basement dwellers over on the forum. Everything has its useful life cycle. Ambition is often the culprit behind walls going up.
I will continue to watch with curiosity to see what happens next. So there is that.
I don’t like the additional effort required to use the new commenting system. I tried it a couple of times, and now, well, this is probably the last comment I will post. Neither am I likely to make the effort to read comments that take more than one click to reach.
On a related topic, I think the auto-loading of articles on the site is a bad idea as well. You must realize that it completely negates the use of the back key? If you click on an article that has been auto-loaded and then use the back key, it does not take you to where you left off, it takes you to the bottom of the first page for the day which might be miles away.
Both of the issues I mentioned seem like the result of trying to fix something that was not broken. Please try harder.
Yes, this has come perilously close to destroying BoningBoing’s attraction for me too.
We went into great pains to make sure the back button always works, the only spot it is faulty is IE9 and below. Are you using IE9?
No, I am using the latest version of Chrome. I just tested this and the problem persists. I also just tried Firefox and I can see that it does return to where you were but through a series of very disconcerting screen jumps.
Yeah I have some weirdness reproduced here, working on a fix … for example
Scroll to post #475 reload, it takes you to post #472 … have a repro on local … seeing if I can clean it up so it stops jumping.
Just to be clear, Chrome does not even attempt to take me back to the place I drilled down from. Firefox gives me the delightful opportunity to re-experience each individual page extending ajax call that I had been through to get the article I clicked on. Both of these situations have been the case for many months, so I figured BB must know about them and did not intend to fix them. I apologize for not reporting them earlier.
I’d rather see a + or thumbs-up, personally. A heart is too strong.
I just tried to “continue the discussion”, (regarding the Octophant mural) and got a message:
“The page you requested doesn’t exist or may have been deleted by a moderator.”
But what I read was:
“The page you requested doesn’t really exist or may have been deleted by a moderator.”
Recommend BB adopt this as the message.
Here we go:
Just to add my voice - I don’t like this new commenting method- I have been using it now for a while and I like it even less than when it first came out.
Just a comment from a reader who doesn’t usually say much.
What in particular bothers you?
I don’t like the flat structure for one - I found it easier to follow a conversation when it was nested.
I don’t like going to another page for the comments. When I go to comment or read a comment I usually flick up to the original content to see what was said exactly.
I also don’t like that when I go to the list of other topics below I have to click on the topic which brings me to the discussion and then go to the top and find the link to the article so I can go and read that.
I thought I’d get used to it but instead I’m less likely to read the comments at all. Which makes me less likely to read the articles since I enjoyed seeing the comments. I was just beginning to comment myself rather than just read. So I have probably actually commented more since the change over but it’s not a comfortable experience for me. I find it too hard to see what other people have said in reply to someone or to see that the original comment got deleted/moderated etc.
I find I am preferring to go to other sites with the comments at the bottom of the page and nested like they used to be here.
All been said before. But the standard response is “this is better, you are wrong”.
Thats not really fair.
Flat vs. Threaded is religious. There is a topic for it here:
Nobody even bothered responding.
@beschizza plans to embed short posts to alleviate some of the annoying jumping through hoops needed.
cc @Antiqueight
Well I didn’t reply to that because every time I’ve seen the topic come up all that seems to happen is we get dismissively fed the “it’s a religious issue” line and that’s that. It’s especially annoying because the only source that seems to be backing absolute flat is Jeff’s own blog post.
