Towards a taxonomy of “he said, she said”
13:01 on Monday, April 04, 2005 • 6 responses
Khoi’s recent Commentary on Comments, a plea for comment aggregation, provides a good segue to this next installment of my series on ExpressionEngine, etherfarm, and the ways of the universe. I’m less interested, however, in aggregating comments than I am in making comments a more useful protocol for meaningful dialogue.
My ambivalence regarding weblog comments is something I’ve discussed at length with fellow bloggers. From an author’s point-of-view, weblog comments are a great way to get feedback on ideas, and this is one reason I used weblogs as a classroom resource back when I was teaching. As a discursive format, though, I find blog comments severely lacking. It’s not that I think ‘the comment’ completely incapable of fostering meaningful discussion—I just don’t think a series of barked responses necessarily constitutes an exchange. When a blog article exceeds 10, 15, or 20 comments, many people just skip down to the comment box to add their two cents. In my thinking, a CMS should function as a content management system and a conversation management system, but maybe I’m asking for too much. Perhaps genuine conversation eludes systematization.
That said, I know I’ve participated in and continue to witness decent discussions on the web, but for some reason most of these discussions take place on message boards. This seems odd to me because the basic tools for commenting are similar to those which are available on weblogs: a list of written responses and a text entry field. This makes me think that the web-viewing masses make a conceptual distinction between message board posts and weblog comments. Perhaps participation is somehow implicit in message boards—each post contributes to a message thread and in turn solicits further contributions—whereas comments on blog posts are frequently relegated to reaction rather than contribution. Message boards seem to do a better job at fashioning a virtual space for board members than blogs, which generally serve as a bully pulpit from which a weblog author delivers a one-way schtick, occasionally garnering affirmations and/or rebukes from the peanut gallery.
It’s precisely that hierarchical relationship between post and comment which often prevents weblogs and weblog comments from fostering fruitful discussion. The best exchanges have, I think, taken place via the trackback standard, which in principle was a great way to facilitate a loosely threaded discussion between weblogs by referencing weblog posts without necessarily creating a parent-child relationship between participants. Unfortunately, trackback spam and poor definition/dissemination of trackback protocols have either removed trackback functionality from some of my favorite sites or kept it off completely and this trend, unfortunately, will probably only continue. Also, trackbacks perpetuate an “access gap”—only people who own weblogs have a voice, and that’s not acceptable.
For a short while I tried creating a “group blog” site called Thalamus, where members posted their own entries (rather than merely commenting on existing entries). It garnered a bit of attention and had a dedicated following, but didn’t work out for a variety of reasons and the release of etherfarm v4.0 took the Thalamus archives down for good. I think the group blog format has the most promise for creating a culture which fosters online discussion, however, and given ExpressionEngine’s member and group administration features, I may well try it again sometime.
etherfarm v4.0’s design makes some meager attempts at mitigating the effects of the blog post-blog comment hierarchy. ExpressionEngine allows one to integrate trackbacks and comments so that trackbacks are included in a list of comments (see Whither Whatever for an example), a feature I think excellent in theory. Unfortunately, the trackback specification doesn’t mandate that people creating a trackback provide a meaningful excerpt for pinged sites to use—I’d actually like it if the trackback protocol worked a bit more like RSS, so that a weblog entry which is pinged could elect to include an excerpt or a full post as a response (currently it’s either/or and frequently neither).
This desegregation of comments and trackbacks flattens the post-comment taxonomy a little, potentially allowing, for example, a post on another site to function as a comment on mine. As such, I’ve grouped trackbacks and comments into a category called “responses”. I previously had sidebar text which defined responses as “comments (created on this site) and trackbacks (responses created on other sites),” but I took that text out, figuring that drawing attention to the distinction was precisely what I didn’t want to do. Behind the scenes, there’s a bit of PHP involved in managing states—getting the headers and “infoline” text to read appropriately—if trackbacks are on and comments are off, for example, one will see:
If comments and trackbacks are off, however, one will see:
Earlier, I said that ExpressionEngine’s comment-trackback integration was a great idea in theory. It’s great that one can combine comments and trackbacks, but that’s about as far as the thinking went on this feature. You can get a total for comments and trackbacks for a particular entry using the comment_tb_total variable, but no such statistic exists for a blog or an entire EE install. Similarly, the recent comments tags don’t include recent trackbacks. So to say that trackbacks and comments are integrated in EE is only partially true; it often seems to me that EE’s design and architecture needs to catch up to its impressive feature set (not the best order of operations, I think, but what do I know?). Hopefully pMachine will close these (and many similar) gaps in upcoming versions.
Visually, I tried to flatten the post-comment hierarchy by making comments appear like mini-posts. The header and infoline styles for comments are borrowed almost directly from the styles for entries. I toyed with the idea of having the live comment preview display comments-in-progress as posts (using the larger, centered title), so that would-be commenters would work under the pretense of writing a post, but ultimately thought an accurate representation of the comment a better choice.
Some other EE goodness: when serving up the page, EE checks to see if I’m logged in. If I am, each comment on the site appears with the following links in the infoline:
These links bring me to the edit page or delete confirmation page for the respective comment, effectively allowing me to moderate comments from the site rather than from the EE control panel (similar links appear for entries, of course). The code which generates these links can be seen here (as an image; sorry, I don’t have the time to markup HTML to look like BBEdit):
If and when ExpressionEngine provides a means for registered members to edit their own comments (preferably without having to go through the control panel), logged-in members will see an “edit” link for comments they’ve authored.
This article summarizes some of the thoughts I have on weblog commenting in general and covers the specifics of comment implementation on etherfarm. Next up in this series: the ups and downs of ExpressionEngine.