Adding Commenting to Glowbug
I find myself thinking about adding comments to the blog in an effort to foster it's community growth. If I did it I would want the following:
- Identity - Some sort of identity tie. Not trying to force real names, but something that lets me force a user to be identifiable across comments. - Lessens spam and furthers the growth of site.
- Lightweight - ie not Javascript driven - I could turn to 3rd party tools (like Disqus), but speed is a big part of this blog. The whole reason I switched to it being that every page is its own html file and not a server built page. So loading big external JS is not interesting to me.
- Threading - I would want a simple level of threading of comments. Maybe it caps at 2 or 3 depth, but I don't want just an endless scroll.
- End of life - As with my Twitter, I am growing to believe that a lot of content is not useful or beneficial to remain available forever. I haven't implemented an EOL for posts on the blog, but I have been thinking about it. And in that same vein, I am thinking about it for comments.
- Upvotes - A way for viewers to promote and support a comment they like. I don't just want a thumbs up or up arrow. Right now I'm thinking there are two options "Interesting" and "Informative." Readers could vote for one or both.
- Troll Fighting - To be big enough to get trolls is still a ways away for the blog, but it would be prudent to plan for it now and have tools in place to avoid brigading, spamming, hate, etc. whenever it did eventually arrive.
I'm also trying to divorce myself from the standard model of comments where the comments are just at the end of a post. What if the comments were set up like page highlights and folks could comment on specific sections? What would that look like? How would that work?
This is what I'm pondering. We'll see what, if anything, comes from it.