123 thoughts on “Testing Comment Rating

  1. Hmm, no negative scoring—only one option. Not what i would expect to see, but the simplest is often the most elegant.

    I might like to see some hover feedback (or maybe a link cursor) on the plus button so it’s clickability is more obvious. On my laptop screen, i barely noticed the change from green/clickable to gray/clicked.

    Maybe the plus should disappear altogether after you rate a comment.

  2. I was expecting to see a way to hit a negative as well as a positive rating. Maybe having a positive only option has some advantages. I’m not sure.

  3. I don´t understand the point of let us know the existence of a new plugin, without let us know wich plugin in you are talking about, a link to download it, or more info about it.

    No negative rating is kind of weird too.

  4. Next step is to add negative scoring, then you can start allowing a greater proportion of critical comments through. Think of all the fun the fanboys would have clicking the red minus signs: ‘Take that, infidel! And that! Mwhahaha, that’ll teach you to contradict the almighty Ma.tt!’

  5. Interesting. Very subtle, which I like, but there’s no way to leave negative feedback, which seems a shame. It’s not so much a “rate this comment” plugin as it’s a “props for good comment” plugin.

    Nothing wrong with that.

    It’d be cool to add some functionality that made comments with a lot of props stand out – a yellow-tinted background, for instance, or different coloured text. There’s already a plugin that modifies the post author’s comments, so it shouldn’t be impossible to implement. Even cooler would be shades of “propness” – taking the post from a subtle to an obvious difference depending on it’s score.

    Perhaps it ought to be a relative difference, since otherwise you could end up with a comment section all in bright pink or something like that.

    Anyways, looks cool. Now I just need to attract enough readers to make plugins that modify comments worthwhile. 😉

  6. It’s an interesting feature. I really wish there was an ‘author’s favorite’ that allowed the blog author to pop a great comment right to the top of the conversation.

  7. well, its nice to be here.. i also love to join an extraordinary site like this.. i want to gain more friends too and explore something new..

  8. Moxiecode XHR JS is all rights reserved. May conflict with GPL nature of your typical plugins. Perhaps you could use jQuery in its place?

    The plus mark image has an inaccurate alt and title attribute of “Thumbs Up!” (+1 maybe?). Also a good idea to explicitly declare your height and width to prevent browsers from iframing that img on render.

    Would be nice to have a pointer cursor type on the plus mark to communicate a possible action.

    Icon still appears when JavaScript is disabled. Is this a desired behavior? Perhaps set the element to display:none and flip the bit back to display at the beginning of your JavaScript.

    One extra single space at the end of your name/date line. “… ”

    Your comment template adds a at the beginning of the comment but doesn’t close the element (“”).

  9. This implementation seems to ignore Fitt’s Law. The button is too small. Having a negative vote that would decrement the count seems useful, as well.

    Comment scoring is kinda of useless if you do not offer threaded commenting and sorting by comment score. Its primary usefulness is to help pop unanimously useful comments to the top so that they stand out among many others. Digg’s implementation is excellent, as they seem to have worked through all of these challenges.

  10. Hmm this is a nice feature. I would have liked a “thumbs up” image instead of a plus though, and it would be also better if there is a “thumbs down” or ‘-‘ option…

  11. Moxiecode XHR is available under GPL and already used in WordPress as part of TinyMCE.

    Height and width on the icon would be nice, but may limit people that want to replace it. +1 is good too for the title, thumbs up seems more widely used.

    Yes, the cursor should change over the icon. Also some visual indication that the icon was clicked may be in order. The AJAX may take some time to complete and while waiting, it appears that nothing’s happening.

    There should be a way to show people browsing with disabled js that they can vote too if they decide to enable it 🙂

  12. Hrm. Since everyone seems to expect both positive and negative ratings, maybe “rating” and “score” aren’t the words to use. Perhaps “Current Comment Karma?”

  13. The only thought I have after seeing it at work is that:

    You might give an option for the posts to be able to be sorted by score.

    You should have a negative scoring available.

    In Admin are the scores noted? I suggest you have it that way.

    Otherwise, for simplicity, it worked well.

  14. Net is about democratization. Blogging is about super democratization. Rarely have consumers shared the same SPACE as a provider. Imagine being read by the same number of readers as a NYT writer and on the SAME page. This is the spiral high traffic blogs experience. And herein lies the problem too. Because centralization starts taking place all over again. Only some genius would be able to invent dynamic forums, where the comment is independent of site. You make a comment and it goes to whatever site it qualifies for. Then the reply to your comment meets with the same fate. So you are sitting at one place and making comments, and receiving replies and are completely oblivious to hundreds of paths your comments might have taken especially because it feels like you are talking to a small group of people in a room. What might be surprising though is how in-sync those people appear as if they have known you for a long time.

  15. Yeah, I’d kind of like to see a prop/antiprop system myself, although I’m just kind of biased because I like Achewood’s practice of referring to them as “chubbies” and “lames.” …and also hiding overly lame comments, but hey. 🙂

  16. I would be great if there was a way for the reader to sort comments in order of importance voted by readers, that way getting the most out of the post and comments.

  17. thanks for deleting my comment 🙂
    you can thumb up for yourself, this should be changed and also a thumb down icon – should be added, make more sence. and rate must be possible without comment. will you delete my comment again 🙂 ?

  18. Rating systems are great for sites that have a developed community already. It keeps people wanting to maintain that status on the website, like part of the elite club. On smaller sites, you’ll find more people playing around less seriously with the ratings system.

  19. Whilst it works there is a bit of a lag between the click and icon-switch (from green to grey), so perhaps this could be made more instant. Otherwise it’s good – and nice to see a comment system that doesn’t do “thumbs down” – always look for the positive 🙂

  20. Excellent. A very useful tool. It would be nicer though if the plus icons had cursor:pointer attribute to make it more obvious that they are clickable.

    Best,
    Antonie

  21. @Neil (Aug 11 @10:18) problem with order by vote means that you could potentially lose track of any comment threading that happens (such as this reply).

    Matt – I like it but would prefer to see a minus in there too.

  22. I know Matt never answers comments on his blog, so he probably doesn’t even read them… but anyway, someone might be interested to know that after rating several comments, one popped up an alert saying ‘Cheatin’ uh?’. Not good.

    Also, I think a minus button (optional perhaps) is a must, too.

  23. Cool, I guess, although I don’t really see the purpose without a negative rep feature which could like hide low rated posts. Or maybe the background turns green on high rated posts.

    *shrug*

  24. Nice system…. I don’t know how useful such a plugin will be for blogs that don’t an established community; however it is still kinda cool from an ego perspective if people like your comment, they can vote it up. This in itself might help to develop a community…

  25. Where can we find the plug-in? A sort by link at the top of the comments would be great (score, newest, oldest). Either sort by score or simply sort by score/time since the post. This could help balance out the older comments having more time to accumulate a higher score vs. new comments.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS