Dopp Juice Archive

Whew! Moving forward with the blog migration, I’m a little preturbed by the commenting options out there. Commenting, to me, is most valuable when it’s a door to two-way dialogue. The standard blog commenting model, however, is a more or less a list of dead-end mutterings. I don’t like it. I want more.

I was excited about Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin, which allows you to reply to specific comments rather than to a linear mess. I assumed that it came equipped with a “notify the person you’re replying to via email” feature (‘cuz really, that was my whole point for caring), but, sadly, I appeared to be wrong. He just provides the option to subscribe to all the comments in the post. So, in other words, if you subscribe to my comments, and I respond with a quick “thank you” to the guy who commented before you, you’re going to get that in your inbox. Gee, how useful…

Then there was Dodo’s Threaded Comments with Notification hack — which looked very promising indeed, but it lacked two very critical things:

1. The ability to opt-out of notifications (absolutely necessary for an ethical website).
2. The, um, code files. Thank you, outdated websites, for not maintaining your download links.

Really, what I want is Livejournal’s commenting system mashed up onto a WordPress blog with full customization options. But until I figure out how to do that (or someone magically does it for me… hint hint), I’m going to hold off on nested comments and stick to the opt-in all-post notification system… which isn’t the best solution, but it does foster a dinner-party-style conversation, and I believe that’s better than nothing.

And while we’re on the topic of WordPress usability issues, I think it’s worth pointing out that the system’s slick internal spellchecker is convinced that the word “blog” is a typo.   Heh.