- Matthew

As a blogger, I have to be careful not to fall into the “Nascar” trap. Putting up gigantic buttons everywhere looks awful and it’s almost like you’re throwing yourself at your readers.

The Nascar part reminded me of this comic that Mathew Inman (The Oatmeal) made a while ago, 8 Websites You Need To Stop Building: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/websites_stop
Websites full of gigantic RSS buttons and enormous tag clouds, etc. It jolted me to rethink the design of my humble blog

I just have one tiny problem with the idea of keeping the comment box at the bottom: I am a commentator who likes to keep referring back to the original post while commenting. It helps me to respond more directly to the post, and make sure that I don’t just jabber away. So putting the comment box at the very bottom is inconvenient, especially if there are hundreds of comments.

I left before they died.

And since that’s not hard enough for anyone to remember they really should make it harder. The number must proceed either a symbol or the letter “H”, the symbol muust be the 3rd charecter in the password, and the password must end with a lowe case charecter.

Those “secure” passwords, probably get written down much more often than any other passwords…now thats secure.

One of the features of my site uses the P2 Theme (Love it) and I do want to control who can comment. My thought is to use a login that let’s users sign in with Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc accounts they already use. Something like JanRain RPX, which I’m setting up and looks promising.

Is this a good way to tackle it. I just don’t like the idea of a pain in the ass sign up process, and I don’t like the idea of spammers, and anonymous comments.

So a balance would be nice. I guess I can also delete comments and clean up when needed.

Don’t use the Ajax Edit Comments plug-in so that commentators are unable to delete their comments or editing some silly little spelling mistake within 5 minutes of posting (or any other time limit you choose)

Allow 4 levels deep comments, so that replies look like this:

Comment 1
–Comment 2
—-Comment 3
——Comment 4

instead of like this:

Comment 1
–Comment 2
–Comment 3
–Comment 4

This is actually apparent at this blog, which kind of disappoint me, since I admire your blog.

I mean, think about it: Do you really think Comment 4 (in the example) is exclusively replying to Comment 3 and ignoring everyone else? Of course not – any sensible commentator would take a look at the whole thread of comments before adding their own reply.

The situation becomes even more chaotic when you get this:

Comment 1
–Comment 2
—-Comment 4
–Comment 3
–Comment 5
—-Comment 6
——Comment 8
–Comment 7

It screws up the chronological order that comments 2 levels deep still manage to somewhat retain within their own indented thread.

Therefore, 2 levels deep is the maximum number of levels I think we should have – anything beyond that is pointless. So okay, maybe one person in a hundred will want to reply in between Comment 3 and 4, but it won’t kill them if they reply after Comment 4 instead and just refer to Comment 3 using @username or something like that. It becomes pretty obvious who’s talking to who when it’s neatly organized in an indented thread.

Comment two levels deep allows people to reply to original comments and the replies above them while straying away from the “reply to the reply of the reply of the original comment” situation, just because some people are too lazy to click on the reply button of Comment 1, and just click on the first one that catches their eye: the reply button of Comment 4.

Comments 2 levels deep isn’t ideal, because then people have to scroll all the way up to Comment 1 to make click on the reply button. Moreover, when clicking on the reply button of Comment 1, the comment form appears under Comment 1 and not Comment 4, further confusing potential new commentators. I realize these disadvantages, but people aren’t completely dumb – if they really want to reply, they’ll figure it out. And the end result is still so much better and tidier than with comment four levels deep like on this blog.

Your thoughts on this? Have you considered this issue before, and if so, why did you go with comment 4 levels deep? If you Ctrl+F on this page and search for the commentator “Andy Symonds” you’ll find the “replies to the replies to the replies” very evident, with you taking part in it as well!

Also, could you elaborate on Bonus #3, where the comment form is at the top? You have a point, but with popular blogs that have 300 comments, I doubt anyone will take the time to read all of them just so they don’t repeat another person.

I admit, as much as I want to read all the comments on this blog post and reply to some of them, I want to do it at a later time, when I’m less pressed with other stuff. My priority then, for the moment, is to leave my comment, and then come back to check out the others. Scrolling down all the way just to find the comment form isn’t very efficient. What do you think?

What about having the same comment form at the top and bottom? (if that’s even possible using WordPress, correct me if it’s not). Would that be a good idea, or do you think people would be less likely to read the other comments?

I personally never liked to break comments into pages, this way all the conversation remains on one page and helps to quickly refer anything… and looks like you are doing the same on your blog, wonder why you wrote that in the 5th point…

Great work & thanks for WP!