2008-09-17 Visible Comments

As I interact more with other bloggers, I feel that the comment links should be more visible.

Here’s what I’m experimenting with on my personal wiki:

	
MyOldPrintFooter = *PrintFooter;
	
PrintFooter = *MyNewPrintFooter;


sub MyNewPrintFooter {
  my $id = $_[0];
  if ($id and $CommentsPrefix and $id !~ /^$CommentsPrefix(.*)/o) {
    print $q->p({-class=>'comment'},
		GetPageLink($CommentsPrefix . $id, undef, 'comment'));
  }
  MyOldPrintFooter(@_);
}

Notes:

1. There’s no similar obvious link back if you’re looking at the comment page.

2. There link to the comment page does not disappear from the page footer.

I’m not sure what would be the right thing to do. I suspect that blog users would expect to see the full original page at the top of the comment page.

​#Oddmuse

Comments

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⁂

I’m currently experimenting with this variant:

	
MyOldPrintFooter = *PrintFooter;
	
PrintFooter = *MyNewPrintFooter;


sub MyNewPrintFooter {
  my $id = $_[0];
  if ($id and $CommentsPrefix and $id !~ /^$CommentsPrefix(.*)/o) {
    my $target = $CommentsPrefix . $id;
    if ($IndexHash{$target}) {
      print $q->p({-class=>'comment'},
                  GetPageLink($target, T('Read Comments'),
                              'comment'));
    } else {
      print $q->p({-class=>'comment'},
                  GetPageLink($target, T('Add Comment'), 'comment'));
    }
  }
  MyOldPrintFooter(@_);
}

Thus, the link to the comment page will not repeat the page title, and there is a different text depending on whether a comment page exists or not.

As comment pages can be reworked, it’s hard to actually count the comments by looking at the text. It would be possible to store a counter on the comment page that was different from the revision number. That new counter would only be increased if somebody actually submitted a comment instead of just editing the page. If somebody writes an answer by editing the page, however, the count will again be wrong. It seems like a tricky problem.

– Alex Schroeder 2008-09-19 08:31 UTC

Alex Schroeder