I was recently looking at one of the posts that proposed changing the point systems and everything for this contest and I came up with a few ideas about how to keep comments on target and not completly random. I think first of all that there should be a minimum number of words that a comment can have (much less than the minimum in a post of course) but just to keep the two word comments to a minimum. This was the idea that I mentioned in one of my comments and I was looking for some feedback on that.
My other idea came from looking at my tracking page and trying to find out where the "new" comments are. With so many people replying to different comments and with the number of comments that are being made on some posts I think the current tracking system needs updated. It does a very good job of letting us know when new comments are made on a post, unfortunately it has become increasingly difficult to locate which posts are new and which posts are old (going through the dates on each post would be extremely time consuming). What I was thinking was that there should be a way to flag new comments so that you can be taken right to them or at least quickly find them. That way if they are in the middle of the comments (i.e. someone replied to one of your comments) it is easy to find and keep the debate going.
If you guys think that's good or that there is a better way to do something I would love to know. I encourage debating all sides of an issue and I hope that it can be helpful to the progressiveu team in improving the site.
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Actually, they used to have new comments highlighted on the blogs themselves, making it very easy to scroll through old comments and find the new ones. I do think it would be much more convenient to add that feature back into the layout of the pages.
I like what you're trying to do. I did something similar toward the end of the last contest; you can read through some of the many ideas that I and other users had come up with here: http://www.progressiveu.org/190000-getting-ready-for-the-next-progressive-u-contest
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"Dream as though you'll live forever, but live as though there's no tomorrow" --James Dean
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/fanaile-essence
That was nice when they highlighted the new comments and I like the idea of having a minimun number of words for a post. That would cut down on people skimming through the blogs. Also, I haven't seen it much at all this contest, but during the last contest, it got pretty ugly on PU. There were people that seemed to be following a couple of others around the sight just to fight them. They wouldn't even read the blog that they were commenting on. They would just leave snide comments, so I think that one feature that should be added is the opportunity for a user to delete posts that don't have anything to do with the blog or that are like the ones I saw from the last contest. A couple of the people involved were in my buddy list, and I finally got so tired of seeing that junk on their posts, that I finally yelled a couple of times on the posts, but I think that bloggers should be able to at least report and remove that type of thing.
While I understand your reasoning for wanting a feature like that, it will get abused. The best way to deal with it is to report the blog. Then the proU team will investigate and shut down comments.
~C
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I think that the two ideas you offered are good ones. The requirement of words per comment will force people to write more meaningful things other than, "indeed" (which I must say I've done myself) :/.
And, the whole comment thing is SUCH a good idea. If any moderator is reading my comment right now. Please, take Boldfaith3's suggestions to heart, b/c finding new comments is time consuming. You all are doing great!
TCho