Right, I'm fed up of Haloscan. I've put together my own commenting system. It's flaky and broken and ugly, and right now it probably doesn't even work at all, but it'll get better. And even if it doesn't it's better than Haloscan.
It /seems/ to lack a very useful feature that Haloscan had, a way to get automatic emails when a post you've commented on has new comments.
A slight extension of that to the 'stalking' feature on LJ would be nice too.
It might be a good idea to hide the div that the 'Post a comment' box is in when you get the 'Your comment has been posted and is waiting for moderation.' message.
Hurrah!
Though why you don't just use livejournal like everyone else is a mystery.
Oh, you can't uppercase the first letter of the magic word.
Rob: Yes, it lacks that feature at present. I think it would be pretty easy to implement, but it wasn't on my list of must-have features for v0.1... Incidentally, use stars or underlines if you want italics, not slashes. (Hmm, I should add previewing too. I wonder whether it actually works? Let's see: italics and bold, I hope.)
I don't think I'd want to hide the post box entirely (not least because at present the "your comment has been posted" message is inside it), but something along those lines would probably be wise. Much prettification is called for, in any case.
MAW: I don't use LJ because I want complete control over appearance, URLs etc. (losing this was one of the reasons why Haloscan was a stupid move) and because I don't trust Six Apart.
Very impressive. But the links from the "recent comments" box are broken.
Oh yes, so they were. Fixed.
Unfortunately the only thing that's impressive about this is that it was put together in a modest number of hours' work, but it'll get better over time. So far my list of things to change when I have a little spare time is: * "Notify me of future comments here" tickybox. Better linkage: from comments pages back to the entries they're commenting on, from the recent-changes box to individual comments, etc. "Remember me" thing using cookies so you don't have to keep entering (or letting your browser auto-enter for you) the information. Preview. Threading? Assorted de-uglification. Comment deletion and maybe even editing, though it'll never be real-time because of moderation.
And that's without actually spending any more time than it took to type that; I'm sure there are lots of other ways it could be better. But (all together now) it's still better than Haloscan. :-)
Hmm, obviously something's not quite right with Markdown's handling of bulleted lists. That bit's third-party code; I wonder what's going on...
Aha, no, something wasn't quite right with my understanding of Markdown syntax. Let's try again:
- A list item.
- Another list item.
- And another.
Did that work?
The more I think about the email tracking thing, the more convinced I am that it would be difficult to do well without a whole lot of infrastructure -- passwords and such things -- that I really want to avoid. (You need to be able to stop getting notifications, you don't want to have to post a comment to achieve this, you shouldn't be able to subscribe and unsubscribe random other people.)
I could provide an RSS/Atom feed either for the comments on each entry, or for all of them collectively. Rob and anyone else who would like response-tracking: how would that be?
Or I could do a half-assed job of response-tracking by email; no way to turn it off (but comments here will always be moderated, and I've never had a huge number), and no protection other than moderation against having someone turn up pretending to be you and post a comment using your email address.
Post a comment:
Just testing yet again ...