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Comment component

The 1.6 and 1.8 experimental discussion components should be abandoned and instead a Comment Component should be implemented

We currently have a discussion board in MKDoc-1.6 that uses an IMAP backend to store the data. This has been removed in MKDoc-1.8 for various reasons, mainly because it doesn't get much usage – Before we recreate it, we should figure-out why.

The existing design comes from our experience of various internet discussion forums; basically, we make a lot of use of usenet, mailing-lists and irc.

We hardly ever use web-boards because they are so inefficient as a means of discussion. So the MKDoc discussion board was designed as if it was a threaded newsgroup, with all the features of a decent mail/news client.

A Building Communities with software article by Joel Spolsky has some interesting ideas.

I propose that we accept what we always knew: that the web is a terrible medium for discussion, but a good medium for comment.

A replacement for the discussion board might look like this:

We do away with the Discussion component and its IMAP backend and create a new Comment component.

The Comment component inherits from the Text component, but it has three extra pieces of metadata: Title, Author and Date.

Any authenticated user can add a Comment component to the bottom of any document, however not all document templates will display Comment components – Editors will have to select ‘Blog’ or ‘Comment’ templates to make them visible.

(Allowing comments on any document will allow a future bonus feature where users can create a comment that only Editors can see)

The interface for non-editor users will be a simple ‘Add a comment’ text box at the bottom of the page, with a single ‘Submit’ button and no ‘preview’ functionality – There will be no automatic quoting of previous text.

Editors can add, move, edit or delete Comment components just like any other component – Editors should be encouraged to prune duplicated and off-topic bloat from pages.

New comments are always added at the bottom of a page, so the page reads in rough cronological order – There should be no threading.

Any URLs that are automatically hyperlinked should implement the <a rel="nofollow"> spec:

http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html

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This document was last modified by Bruno Postle on 2005-01-21 04:15:06
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