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What I'm doing with the Shoutbox.
Monday / 04.14.08 / 08:17PM / Joe / comments: 3
 First of all, I've always been leery of committing to third-party internet features. If you look back through my various web builds - and you can't - you see that only recently did I allow stuff like Shoutbox and Twitter and BoardGameGeek a place on my site. Prior this era of benevolence, I was pretty well convinced that any outside code would go belly-up in months, causing me to have to rewrite my site again. This hesitation comes from the Early Internet years, where I went through multiple free URL services and plugins and little gimmicky things that all disappeared one day. It took months of soul-searching before I committed to Movable Type, for crissake. I was ready to continue hand-coding HTML updates, because I could retain total control of the behind-the-scenes stuff.
So what I'm saying is that the Shoutbox was already something of a stretch for me. But it's a nice service. The Shoutbox itself is really well-implemented. The custom smileys are a lot of fun, the deluxe controls (which you pay for) are very nice for banning troublemaking IPs. I wholeheartedly recommend it. I'm dropping it because I'm very anal about its use, not because it doesn't work.
I had unregulated Movable Type comments for years, until I was hit with a round of spambots creating bogus comments of links to a fake online poker site. Since every entry has comments associated with it, I had to manually edit out hundreds of junk messages. I turned off commenting after several weeks of that.
After an MT upgrade or two, I figured out how to allow registered commenting. Since my templates are, at the core, fairly long in the tooth, I can't say I've done a 110% job of adding in the modern commenting code. But it works... at least, it works every time I go to it. In today's uncertain times, registered commented is absolutely required. Is that a shame? Sure. Is it inconvenient? Perhaps. Whose website is it? Mine.
Commenting should be about preserving the conversation, and the ease of the Shoutbox breaks that. It's water flowing through the crack in the pipe. People say great stuff, and it is forever disassociated from the proper context. That drives me crazy. So the Shoutbox must go.
Initially I balked at the very concept of comments because of what it looks like to see "comments: 0" all over the place. Failure, right? But since I see the monthly pageviews, that no longer bothers me. My website is not an unattended lecture; it gets more pageviews than some TV stations I know.
The only question is what will replace the Shoutbox, if anything. I whipped up a "recent comments" box, but that's sort of intrinsically weird because, again, it's out of context. But at least you'd see fragments of the conversation and if you want it, nearby links would take you to the entire weblog entry. And, perhaps more importantly, the box needs to be restricted to the first X words or else an egregiously long comment would bump the whole page into the Earth's crust. Double weird. Should "recent comments" even be a sidebar item? Maybe comments should only appear on the actual entry page, with merely a short notation on the main page that comments exist.
The latest Movable Type upgrade introduced some interesting commenting features that I want to investigate... like commenter avatars, which I would love. And you'd think there must be a way to get commenting to automatically turn off per entry after a certain number of weeks has passed. Because who needs people diving back to resurrect a three-year-old post?
More than likely, I'll just toss up the "recent comments" box and then tweak things going forward. Before the Shoutbox vanishes (and June is the deadline), I'll scrape out some of the comments and attach them to the relevant stories. And then hopefully I'll figure out something neatly robust for the site's commenting system. |
You make great points, as always. Some of us just aren't as respectful of the proper use of the Internets as you are. Reverence has no place in most modern Net users' world...it's all Get Me That Thing I Want Now With No Fuss.
(SIGNING IN?!! What a chore.)
But, I'll play your game.
Posted this from my Wii, by the way. Internet Channel House!
The Tony: "Proper use of the Internets" is pretty subjective. If you want to go by what's accepted within the professional web development "community," if you will, our goal is to have the end user be able to do 95% of everything within the site without logging in, of course, saving the 5% for things that require an account, such as bonus (aka paid) features within the site.
When I develop websites, I put the end user to mind, even if it means more work for me. I put all the controls at their fingertips, and allow them to create content (comments, et al) within the site extremely easily, to generate enticement and motivation for them to do so.
While I agree with Joe's thinking of the comments being disconnected from the respective entries, as a web developer, I don't agree with the outlined methodology.
I'm not sure how much web programming experience Joe has (PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby/MySQL?), but if I were working on the site, I'd probably add a link to each posts's permalink area which would kick in some JavaScript to elegantly expand a commenting textarea and include a captcha a bit lower. Captchas can be annoying, but they're a lot less annoying than having to register for Yet Another Account on a website. Personally, I use KeePass to track my website logins, and I have over 150, less than 10 of which are sites I visit daily. It's a chore to keep that many accounts registered.
Because of that very reason, however, I applaud the ability to comment via OpenID. I'm a big supporter of OpenID and feel that it'll eventually reach a larger scale and be used as a primary way to log into websites, as the general populace starts to visit as many websites as I do now. :)
tl;dr: I support closing the shoutbox, would implement commenting differently, and visit way too many websites for my own good.
This kinda comment length good in lieu of a shoutbox post, Joe? :) haha
Yeah, I really dig the expand-o-comment thing, particularly for the "main" page. I should figure out how to do that.