Re: Proposal for a comments system

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2010-04-05 at 00:28 +0100, Philip Withnall wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-04-04 at 17:22 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > On Sun, 2010-04-04 at 22:45 +0100, Philip Withnall wrote:
> > > Probably also need a status for "duplicate".
> > 
> > There will surely be duplicates, although hopefully
> > people will tend to read comments before submitting
> > new ones. But I think it might be too much overhead
> > for admins to hunt dup numbers and mark things as
> > duplicate.
> 
> I didn't mean for comments closed as "duplicate" to have a dup number
> associated with them — there's no need for that kind of level of detail.
> I merely thought that having a "duplicate" status would be more
> informative than closing all duplicates as "invalid", or something.

Well, they can be marked "resolved". The reason I allow users
to submit their email address, even though we don't display
it, is that we can send them a quick message when we resolve
their comments. I think "duplicate" is only useful if we can
identify what it's a duplicate of, and send the user the same
response.

Although, I've been thinking that resolved comments might need
to be marked with a version number. That way they still show
up on older versions of the page that don't have our fix. In
that case, maybe it is useful to mark duplicates so that only
one of them shows up.

But with versioned resolutions and duplicates, we're approaching
bugzilla-like complexity. This is going to require more thought
to address all these issues in a simple way.

I think, however, that most of this can be added server-side as
the need arises, without affecting the external API. So maybe
we just start simple and grow as needed.

> > I would actually *love* to get real usage information,
> > like the click paths people take to a page, or search
> > terms people use. But it's borderline evilish to send
> > that information without an extra opt-in that tells
> > users exactly what we're sending. And that's just not
> > the sort of opt-in you can feasibly ask for in help.
> 
> Couldn't the opt-in for sending usage information to the comments server
> be the same as the one for downloading comments? i.e. You get three
> options:
>  * Don't do anything with the server
>  * Download comments only
>  * Download comments and upload usage information
> The default would be the first option.

That might work. I think "upload usage information" needs
some extra explanation, but if the dialog is too full, I
fear it will be intimidating. Maybe some sort of disclosure
or on-demand help balloon.

--
Shaun