As some have already noticed, we installed some new commenting plug-ins late yesterday adding some features that many have been requesting:
- Editing: It happens all too often. You compose an insightful, witty bit of prose and hit POST only to discover that the formatting is wrong, you’ve misspelled something, or you left out a word and thus completely changed the meaning. Now, you can go in and fix it within three minutes. After that, the comment will live on to your eternal shame.
- Reply: You can click on the “Reply” link on the lower right of any comment and it automatically puts an @commentername and hyperlinks the comment to which you’re responding. This provides most of the benefit of threaded commenting while retaining a single thread.
- Like or Dislike: I’m skeptical of this one and it may be short-lived. The idea is that other users can signal when your comment is abusive, trollish, or otherwise unhelpful to the discussion. If it works properly, it’s a more immediate and less harsh feedback mechanism than moderator warnings and bans. The concern, of course, is that people will simply vote for commenters they like on ideological grounds and vote down those they disagree with. We’ll see how it goes.
Overall, the tenor of the discussion here has improved vastly since we started cracking down on or most annoying trolls a couple weeks back. Removing just four people from the conversation has been a classic case of addition by subtraction.
