Commenting on comments

Yesterday Sanne posted some valuable feedback on my lazy prototype, which made me think about commenting on comments a bit longer.

About 22 years ago I wrote columns for my former badminton club, which were published in our monthly newsletter. I wrote them under a pseudonym back then, probably too scared of what people would think of me. But I missed the feedback. So I turned my columns into a separate website and added a comment form. The Wayback Machine still has a copy archived, and I'll probably add most of what I wrote during those days to my own website. Time to fully face my fears. My older writings (and all comments from back then) are up here now.

Anyway, I went overboard with PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS and JS (responsive didn't exist yet), and I added replies to comments, so I could have a sort of anonymous interactive conversation with my readers.

Fast forward half my life: I've also added some sort of conversational UI over here, for short emoji responses and full replies, and I made myself a place to keep track of comments. Chat bot interfaces are super popular these days, so I went with that style. Or maybe it was the Messages interface I copied, I don't know. It made me play with anchor positioning for a bit, which is the joyful part.

Let me know your thoughts and feedback, so I can test it out :)

Comments

I'm a big fan of two levels of comments; it really hits the sweet spot between flat and fully-threaded. But please make it possible for people other than yourself to comment on comments, too, so you can have full-fledged little subthreads.

Also /comments needs links back to the context, so I can see which older log entry Vasilis was commenting on. :)

...of course, scrolling down a page I see the earlier comments which it was the followup to. If only Vasilis had been able to comment on his own comment, I would've had the necessary context to not need a link for context.

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