re: re:

[dr_tectonic]

Okay, having just been thoroughly confused detangling what was in response to what over yonder on another site, here's the new rule. Pay attention, everybody who might ever develop social software of whatever type:

If you allow comments? Thread them.

Period.

I don't care if it's more work. I don't care if it doesn't play nicely with your infrastructure. When people are saying things, they're usually saying them in response to something else that has been said, and making it easy to see how these things line up with one another is essential to the actual "communication" part of that whole saying stuff thing you're enabling. Otherwise it's all just half a cell-phone conversation in public, which is both useless and annoying.

Comments are threaded. ALWAYS.

I have decreed it! Now make it so!

Comments

[flwyd.livejournal.com]

For some reason, I've yet to find a web forum with an interface as useful as any random Usenet client (say, trn in its ncurses goodness). And really, that's just three features (I'll give a pass on things like killfiles) -- pick a subject you want to read, navigate threads, and don't show messages I already read (unless I ask for them). Most forums do feature 1. Some do feature 2, though often awkwardly. Why the hell is feature 3 so hard that nobody does it?

I hope Google Wave comes out well. It has all three features and may even be able to impose them on sites which don't offer #3.

Re #3

[detailbear.livejournal.com]

Part of it is the need for either sign-ons or cookies to implement this. Sign-ons are considered too much trouble and cookies are considered to be evil by many.

Re: Re #3

[flwyd.livejournal.com]

From LiveJournal to phpbb, logging in is a pretty standard feature. And if you told me I can skip comments I've already logged in, I'm going straight to the sign-up link as a trouble-saving measure.