November 30, 2007

Comments Policy Update II

We've gone about two weeks with the new comment system from Disqus at CapQ, and I'm pleased to see it working as well as it has. The folks at Disqus have received a lot of feedback from the commenters here, and have quite a list of updates to implement. The outstanding issues that I've seen include:

* Absolute timestamping (time zones are the trip-up, I understand)
* Viewer option for threading or flat displays
* Either a preview option or an edit option
* Sorting options on an individual basis (hot, old, new, etc)

They have a couple of requests from me, too, and I look forward to their implementation.

Some people have written me with questions about the change. I'd like to address the answers to everyone:

Why change at all? -- I have been dealing with an increasing level of trolls and sock-puppets, and quite frankly, it's made me overreact in some cases of off-topic commentary and other issues. I'd rather have a registration system that keeps those issues from popping up at all, and take it off my plate entirely. I tried Typekey, but that caused more problems than it solved.

Why Disqus? -- Movable Type does not include a very good comment-management system, and the Typekey option didn't work well. Disqus was suggested by a CapQ reader who works there, and I liked the easy interface and the threading, voting, and other features of the system.

Why the threading? -- One of the issues I had to police before was off-topic commentary. With threading, that mostly polices itself. People can reply to specific comments, and if that goes off on a tangent, it's limited to that thread. Commenters can also vote other comments into disappearing on their displays so that they don't need to trip over commentary they feel is off-topic.

I don't like moderation -- Well, neither do I. I'm actually not moderating Disqus for content, but for verified registration. If you want your comments to appear immediately, verify your registration with Disqus, and it doesn't wait at all to appear. Those comments that do get held for verification have to wait for me to check the queue and clear the backlog. I will require verified registration and block all other comments in the next couple of weeks, so please make sure you complete the verification process with Disqus soon. I'm waiting for some of the above fixes to come first.

Thanks for your patience. I'm hoping to improve the experience here at CapQ with these changes. Feel free to post your thoughts on this in the comments section for this post. Both myself and Disqus will be keeping a close eye on them!

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