Re: Proposal for a comments system

[Stefan Kost <ensonic hora-obscura de>]

On 06.04.2010 17:33, Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-04-06 at 18:53 +0530, Anirudh wrote:
>   
>> Hi,
>>
>> What is the exact motivation for using a comments system? I can see it
>> serve two purposes - one to point out any errors, inconsistencies or
>> ambiguous documentation, and the other to ask questions. If it's the
>> latter, you'll end up having a lot of people asking questions from the
>> related to unrelated \- as sometimes people are desperate to reach out
>> and find some help.
>>
>> On an article about Desktop resolution settings, someone might post
>> "Help! My sound doesn't work" and get disappointed as nobody looks or
>> is willing to help.
>>     
> No doubt about it. People email me all sorts of support requests
> right now, for every random application under the sun, because
> my name is in the About dialog of the help viewer.
>
> The unfortunate fact is that we're going to have to mark some
> comments as invalid, because we don't have the wherewithal to
> deal with random (and often not-GNOME) support requests. But
> we will get good, valid user feedback as well.
>
>   

Can we also make use of the userbase here. Like having thumbs up/down
buttons next to the comments. Yelp can use the score to order comments
and the web ui could help to review comments with a negative score when
doing cleanups and positive score when doing a docs revamp.

Stefan
>>  Also if you are interested in deploying a comment
>> system purely for online usage, you might consider using Disqus[1] or
>> IntenseDebate[2]. These work really well for preventing spam but call
>> non-free systems on the backend, which might be a problem. These also
>> prevent the need to rewrite the library server code to work with
>> threaded comments, etc.
>>     
> There is absolutely no way we could ever deploy a proprietary
> system. I'm open to using an existing open-source solution,
> but I don't think there are any that provide the experience
> we want.
>
>   
>> I've written a program called Splatter [3] that retrieves comments and
>> bugs from bugzilla and caches them locally. What I learned while doing
>> that is it's pretty hard to keep a server resource and local resource
>> in sync, both for the server and the client (then again I am pretty
>> naive and inexperienced), but writing a desktop client to work with a
>> cloud service and download _only_ the updates since last time, and to
>> cache all the existing updates can lead to all sorts of problems.
>>     
> For this specific case, I don't think it's a very hard problem.
> We don't have to sync, per se. We only have to post and then
> pull updates. Syncing only becomes tricky when local clients
> are able to modify existing data.
>
> --
> Shaun
>
>
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