Taking Down Disqus Comments

I am finding that Disqus style comments are increasingly out of step on Tumblr. The overwhelming majority of interaction here is native Tumblr reposting, likes, and replies.

If you are a Tumblr non-user, I suggest you get an account and try it. Here’s a post where I describe how rich the ‘inside view’ is at Tumblr.

If you’d like to chat with me about something posted here you can try @stoweboyd on Twitter, click on the ‘contact me’ or ‘ask me anything’ in the right hand margin. 

15 May 2013 11 Permalink

Re: Tumblr Notes Design Ethos: How Threaded Replies Can Work by Greg Battle

Gbattle throws down on my suggestions about fixing Tumblr notes (a la Notr), suggests how it might all fit in with Tumblr’s (or David Karp’s) prickly sense of nice communication, and then offers this up:

Gbattle via Leftover Takeout

For Stowe’s threaded replies to work and also adhere to the Tumblr Design Ethos, a few enforcements are necessary:

• Authentication for involvement in reply threads are based upon the relationship between the replier and the original content post author, not among the repliers.  Specifically, each replier must have a bidirectional following relationship with the content owner or be a follower of the content owner for at least two weeks.  Hence, in Stowe’s example, he should absolutely be allowed to reply to me (gbattle) on an indented, threaded basis.
• Just as all Tumblr Notes can be throttled, any subset of threaded replies can also be throttled to improve visibility in the Dashboard.  Users can optionally expand threaded replies to reveal thread details.
• No replier can reply to his or her own reply.  This safeguards against thread spam and unnecessary threading.
• Once a threaded reply has been started, the parent reply can no longer be edited.  The preserves context for the threaded discussion.

Like Stowe, if Tumblr, Missing-e, or an independent browser extension developer would like to discuss the details on implementing the above, I’d be happy to help.

Note: Given the above restrictions, I don’t think Disqus integration into the Dashboard, however cool, would support everything necessary.

For Disqus (or some other external group) to pull all that off would require a very deep access into Tumblr, where I bet the APIs don’t go today. The best thing would still be Tumblr (or Karp) deciding that it would be cool, or simpler, to make replies/notes work and drop the fan mail, asks, and so on.

Source: leftovertakeout.com

31 July 2012 2 Permalink

A Speculative Design: How Tumblr Notes Should Work

In the hopes of getting someone to fix Tumblr’s notes — either inside Tumblr or an outside developer — I am offering the following proposal for a how I’d like Tumblr notes to work. (By the way, anyone who is interested in implementing, give me a call.)

Today’s notes work like this:

1. A user, say gbattle, reads something of mine, let’s say in his Tumblr stream. He takes an action, let’s say he replies to it (which I have enabled), and that gesture is reflected in the list of notes associated with the post.
2. Later on, others looking at the post — either in the stream or on the post’s page — can see his reply along with all the other social gestures left behind by others, including other likes, rebloggings, and replies.

The problem is that I can’t reply back.

Solution:

Imagine a product called Notr, that replaces the notes section of Tumblr themes. It would interact with Tumblr’s API to fetch notes, but it would also keep track of the relationship between notes implied by nesting. Where Tumblr’s notes system is inadequate, or blocks the creation and management of notes, Notr would conserve the notes in its own database.

Note the little talk balloon next to gbattle’s reply, which is provided by Notr here. I could re-reply to gbattle by clicking the balloon, and typing in some text:

And then others could also reply to that thread:

The implementation would be something like Disqus, but integrated with the Tumblr notes system, to the extent that it is possible.

Obviously, it would be simpler if Tumblr would implement notes this way, and we could all drop the amazingly annoying use of unintegrated Disqus. Alternatively, Disqus could implement this as a version of the product.

(This post is related to this gripe, from earlier today.)

28 July 2012 19 Permalink

New Disqus

I noticed that Disqus has revamped the look and functionality of their commenting system.

Note the prominent capability to share a comment on Twitter, as well as the ability to subscribe to a comment thread by email or RSS, and a trackback URL. The last is interesting since Tumblr doesn’t support the trackback protocol.

The tweet that Disques generates is fairly standard, and it did pull Jevon’s Twitter handle out of his profile, which is quite helpful:

I wonder if Disqus is planning to do something like their own social network? It may seeema bit disjoint, but it might be interesting to see the stream of comments from someone you admire, so long as Disqus set context in some way. It would certainly be interesting to see what Flipboard might do with information like that.

I learned that Disqus is rolling out a new Use Ranks functionality, too. I’ll have to look into that more deeply.

19 December 2011 11 Permalink

Reuters New Approach To Comments

I think the Reuters’ approach is very smart:

Dean Wright, Toward a more thoughtful conversation on stories

Until recently, our [comment] moderation process involved editors going through a basket of all incoming comments, publishing the ones that met our standards and blocking the others. (It’s a binary decision: we don’t have the resources to edit comments.)

This was unsatisfactory because it delayed the publication of good comments, especially overnight and at weekends when our staffing is lighter.

Our new process grants a kind of VIP status on people who have had comments approved previously. When you register to comment on Reuters.com, our moderation software tags you as a new user. Your comments go through the same moderation process as before, but every time we approve a comment, you score a point.

Once you’ve reached a certain number of points, you become a recognized user. Congratulations: your comments will be published instantly from now on. Our editors will still review your comments after they’ve been published and will remove them if they don’t meet our standards. When that happens, you’ll lose points. Lose enough points and you’ll revert to new user status.

The highest scoring commentators will be classified as expert users, earning additional privileges that we’ll implement in future. You can see approval statistics for each reader on public profile pages like this, accessed by clicking on the name next to a comment.

It’s not a perfect system, but we believe it’s a foundation for facilitating a civil and rewarding discussion that’s open to the widest range of people. Let me know what you think.

So, newbies get moderated, gaining points until they cross a threshold into being regulars who are not moderated. But regulars can lose points by breaking the groundrules, and can fall back into always being moderated. And lastly, regulars who make a real contribution can gain enough points to be considered experts, which will lead to more rights.

Basically a meritocratic system, and one that should be widely emulated.

Can’t this logic be built into systems like Disqus, for example?

Source: blogs.reuters.com

9 October 2010 4 Permalink

Back To Disqus Comments

Okay. I give.

22 September 2010 Permalink

Giving Up On Disqus Comments

I keep expecting that Tumblr will announce their own take on comments (ministreams? A better version of Notes?) but they haven’t as of yet.

But the Disqus comment system just doesn’t gibe well with Tumblr, or my increasingly Twitter-oriented world. And the Disqus ‘Reactions’ — an implementation of BackType’s Twitter monitoring technology — seemed to stop working this week. So I have modified this template to drop the Disqus comments, and I have included a Tweetmeme button on each post, instead.

Here you see two posts, one with no Tweets referring to it, and the other with one. In either case, clicking on ‘tweet’ will allow you to create a tweet with a URL pointing to the post.

In the case of posts with existing tweets pointing at them, clicking on the number — ‘12 tweets’ — will open a Tweetmeme window displaying those tweets.

So, I am adopting this mechanism in lieu of external comments. At least the Twitter stream is a living breathing place, while the comment threads on blogs feel like an old cobwebby library.

—-

Update: Saturday 11 September 2010

I was tweeted by @golda from BackType who suggested that a BackType button might be simpler that the sort of noisy and ad-busy Tweetmeme result.

Another reason to switch to Backtype from Tweetmeme is that BackType will show results going back as far as the post was original created. Although there seems to be an issue in my case, perhaps due to the domain name change I went through at the start of the summer. So I will try this for a while and see.

10 September 2010 Permalink