January 18, 2004 | View Comments (14) | Category: Information Architecture
Summary: The problem with current commenting systems, a solution to the problem, and my thoughts on human discussion.
After Tom asked me to write something on a PHP commenting system in this thread my mind quickly went to work (well quick to me anyways), because I began to realize that there had to be a better way to have comments on websites. I figured I would try to compare what comments are in real-life terms and for this site it was quite easy. Many times you will see myself and others refer to comments here as "discussions" because in reality that is what they are. On other sites comments may only be some quick remarks that people drop off not really expecting a reply, but here comments are left because people wish to actively participate in a conversation. However, the current MT comment technology fails miserably at facilitating these discussions.
During a one-on-one conversation both people are actively aware of the current topic. If the topic changes from politics to sports, it usually occurs with the interests of both people in mind. For this reason a comment system is perfect, as long as when the topic changes, everyone understands the change and feels that it is in their best interests to continue on with the discussion of the current topic.
When you begin to add more people to a conversation, then chances of the original discussion going off topic or change direction becomes even greater. In this case many times not everyone will be interested in the change of direction or wish to go on to a new topic. They would like to continue the discussion of the original topic, but are unable to because the group majority has already moved on.
Another example is that maybe the "conversation starter" (entry) has many different topics that people could discuss. For example, a web site critique could focus on usability, IA, and typography. Not everyone might be interested in IA, but for those that are, why should they be cut off from any engaging conversations? The current commenting systems do not allow for this. Once a topic changes in the discussion and someone follows it up, then it takes another active group to change the topic again. After some time you could have up to 50-80 comments that almost have no relation to each other and the only people who seem to care about them are the ones who followed the discussion from the beginning and have actively participated in every topic change.
One solution that has been shown (not to work in my opinion) are threaded commenting systems, like the ones Slashdot uses. The reason these still don't work to me is because you don't get to see the whole view of a conversation. Once you go down one path of a thread you seemingly get lost and once you find your way out it takes a while to get readjusted to what the only original discussion was about.
Now my idea of a good commenting system would be one where I could always get the "whole" view of the conversation. Let me see if I can come up with a graphic to illustrate my point (click to enlarge).
Technically I would argue that this is what a threaded comment system looks like when actually drawn out. But can you see how much easier it would be if we actually had a map of the comments to guide us? If I am one of those types who don't want to read another thread on IA I just skip those comments all together. If one section of the thread simply becomes a flamewar, all I have to do is close that portion of the discussion and not the whole thing. Quality discussions could go on for days, weeks, months, and years. As it stands the only feasible solution I have requires dual-monitors with the actual comments on one monitor and the comment map on the other monitor.
I think something like this would greatly improve discussions on websites. Understandably, a system like this would not be for every website, but for ones where the discussion can get heavy and involve numerous aspects of one topic. There is so much information that is lost in online discussions simply not because there is so much of it, but because it is not better presented. That is the purpose of Information Design. It is not the ability to get rid of information, but the ability to present it to everyone so that it is actually retained.
Dunstan has arguably the most advanced comment system of any blog around and I think is one that is moving in the right direction. The problem lies in the fact that if the discussion gets to be too long it is still possible to get lost only because the discussion is presented linearly. But I am glad to see someone stretch the idea of how a comment system should work instead of simply reinventing the wheel.
Now although I just went on for a good while trashing current commenting systems, please do not let this stop you from sharing your ideas and opinions regarding this idea. I think some useful applications could come from this.
Trackback URL: http://9rules.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/112
That's great, but it still doesn't help solve the problem of allowing me to see the whole discussion. I can't follow a Slashdot discussion (if you can all it those) beyond a couple of comments. And it is still presented linearly. But who knows, I may give it a shot.
Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)
Email- and Newsreaders face quite similar problems.
Microsoft recently proposed this:
http://jwz.livejournal.com/288955.html
They intend to merge the Treeview and a flat Timeline into a single view.
Something like this could also be done on websites
levin
I think we're using the comment system for the wrong thing. I'd love to discuss many of the topics you bring here, but it's just too painful to discuss on a blog comment system.
Blogs comments, in my opinion serve best as a mechanism to give public feedback to the author's post, and, at most, to previous readers' comments. Carrying a discussion is rather complicated.
I was just mentioning it on WD-L a few days ago that people are taking the discussions away from the mailing lists and into their blogs. I mentioned you and shea in my post.
I for one think mailing lists and newsgroups, read through the appropriate software, are the best media to carry long and ramified discussions.
The problem with blog comments is not only in the lack of thread or another track-keeping method. Threads in fact work very well in mail/news software but fail miserably on html interfaces. (I kind of like dunstan's solution)
The problems that affect me the most are the inabilities to keep track of read/unread status and of being notified when new comments are posted to a thread you are interested in or in a reply to a comment you made.
I have a theory that it's more interesting to keep your words somewhere you have control over (your blog) than over at a mailing list archive because 1) It's better promotion for yourself and 2) you can kill anything you regret saying. (you can also correct typos)
Now, I would be very interested in seeing the replies to this thread, but guess when I'm visiting whitespace again? When my news reader informs me of a new post of yours.
One thing I suggest is having comment rss feeds, and preferably separated by post. It'd at least help new comment notification and keeping track read/unread status.
Caio Chassot (http://v2studio.com/k)
I've always wanted to be able to have a nice visual map of comments, and the only route I could see working was via Flash - I would imagine that it would provide an ideal interface for the kind of setup you want Paul.
You'd be able to drag threads about, see a post's position in relation to other comments, cross-link your comments with others... lots of things.
I think the kind of visual mapping we're talking about requires a form of user-interaction that only Flash safely provides right now.
Dunstan (http://www.1976design.com/blog/)
I like the Flash idea, Dunstan, but it would be difficult to keep it accessible or indexable by the search engines. The possibilities are interesting and it's certainly something I’d like to see. The ability to interact with the threads, dragging them into different parts of the screen in order to keep track of them is a neat thought. I wonder if it could be done with DHTML and/or SVG...
Back to Scrivs’ diagram in his post—how about orienting it horizontally. New topics/threads would drop below the main/parent thread, but things could still be followed from left to right.
Eventually you’d need to scroll vertically as well as horizontally (as more threads are added), but as long as you keep the height of the comment containers reasonable, you could follow each thread from left to right without having to scroll up and down, too. Long posts would need to be split into two or more “screens”, and that would take a bit of programming to handle, but I’m sure it could be done (like the International Herald Tribune site, http://www.iht.com ).
Just a thought...
Mark Newhouse (http://gnuhaus.com/iblog/)
Hmmm, possibly a desktop application that uses the Comment RSS feeds of entries maybe?
Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)
"I like the Flash idea, Dunstan, but it would be difficult to keep it accessible or indexable by the search engines. The possibilities are interesting and it's certainly something I’d like to see. The ability to interact with the threads, dragging them into different parts of the screen in order to keep track of them is a neat thought. I wonder if it could be done with DHTML and/or SVG..."
That could certainly be done with DHTML, but it would be so messy. If you have more than 10 or so comments the whole site would be obscured with panels floating around. You could make them dockable, but that would mean a lot of hassle to operate. Something that doesn't do the function of comments any good.
As for the searchengine issue, a little javascript goed a long way. Consider this: when the page has loaded, the comments are hidden with javascript and CSS. Then, it puts a little code after the whole comments shebang that will hold the swf.
Or you can click on a link that will create a popup with the swf in it. It does the checking all by itself, so the usability won't be harmed. If you don't want to see the flash, or there is simply no understandibly complex thread, you don't have to see it.
The flash part is a bit more difficult. It would need an xml file of the comments and the whole structure to be able to visualize the tree-like structure. Then it's just a matter of clicking the comment to make the whole branch visible. The hardest part would be to figure a way to show that branch. Maybe a parent-and-child system, where every comments has it own parents and children?
Hmm, this is something very interesting. Especially to show those usability guys that flash has it's purpose. ;) Maybe i'll do something with it... Either way, it's a great idea.
[m] (http://mantaworks.nl)
Is anyone aware of how I go about getting comment feeds for each individual entry?
Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)
Well now there is a comments feed at http://9rules.com/whitespace/comments.xml if anyone is interested in that.
Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)
you said:
Hmmm, possibly a desktop application that uses the Comment RSS feeds of entries maybe?
RSS is just not powerful enough (no threads, no possibility to answer...)
What aboout a mailing list? It would be _way_ better suited for discussions.
levin
ok... whenever flash or dhtml comes up in a context like this, it's officially time to take a step back and consider switching to a different brand of bleach for your drinking binge.
if you want to see what that would look like, look at one of the several so-called 'google buster' search engine shells that have risen over the last year, all of which use some sort of pseudo-mindmap interface in flash or shockwave or java to help sort results. As novelties, they're interesting, but they're not really very usable
Have you considered using a forum rather than mt comments, Paul? Really, your site seems to fit that structure better. Rather like folks on one of my writing sites, the topic is discussed below, with quoting and so forth enabled. and it could be threaded, I suppose. I personally find threading to be a real pain in the ass visually unless there are a very large number of comments which really have little to do with the subject at hand and mostly contain comments on comments on comments (for example, slashdot).
Plus it would be really great to see someone do a nice CSS positioning based skin for phpbb. The skins available for download with it are all table based.
A mature forum system like phpbb has all the notification stuff built in, and tracking for what you've read and what you haven't. It can even do RSS and so forth, via add-on modules. Might be worth a look-see.
JC (http://www.thelionsweb.com/weblog)
I was inspired to write my own post on this topic, in part as a response to this post.
You can read it here: http://www.mavenglobe.com/blog/2004/01/18/blog_comments.html
Jacob Wolfsheimer (http://www.mavenglobe.com/blog/)
It probably wouldn't work for blogs, but personally I like the way craigslist forums handle threading. They use frames (frames aren't always evil). The left frame has a tree structure and the right frame shows the contents of the post you're currently looking at. It's slightly more work than just scrolling your page down, but it keeps the thread structure nicely and you can see which posts you've already read just by using a different color for visited links.
http://forums.boston.craigslist.org/?forumID=4
Jennifer (http://jennifergrucza.com)
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#1
http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~akosut/software/mtthreadedcomments.html
"MTThreadedComments adds full-fledged threaded commenting features to a Movable Type weblog. Inspired by the comment features of LiveJournal, it adds threading and subject lines to Movable Type comments. This means your readers can carry on more complex discussions, adding their own titles and replying directly to other comments."
Adam Kalsey (http://kalsey.com)