All in the <head> – Ponderings and code by Drew McLellan –

Comments on Comments

Since upgrading the version of Textpattern that runs this site back in February, I’ve been utilizing a feature which places the current comment count at the end of the title in both my Atom and RSS fields. The idea of this feature is that it enables those who read this site via those feeds to see when new comments are added.

Since enabling the feature, I’ve had feedback from readers both positive and negative in nature. A couple of people have told me that they find it really useful, whereas others are finding it annoying that services they have monitoring my feeds are reporting new posts when none exist (just comments). Either way, the level of feedback I’ve received has prompted me to reevaluate the feature. As far as I can see, there are a number of options.

Leave the feeds as they are and hope not too many people get pissed off by it
Get all retro and forget the comment count all together
Provide an alternative version of the feeds without the comment count – would make each camp happy, but would be more confusing when subscribing (which feed to chose?)
Provide a separate feed of comments. This would have the advantage of being able to read all content via the feeds, but has the disadvantage of fragmenting the content across disparate feeds.
Something else I haven’t thought of yet.

I’m leaning towards the fourth option – providing a separate comments feed. But do comments feeds really work? Do you subscribe to any? So, dear readers – especially those of you who read via Atom or RSS – I need your feedback. What’s a girl to do?

– 26 April 2004 –

16 Responses

26 Apr 2004

Nathan Pitman

I turned off my comment counts on the RSS feed since it was adding multiple entries to the MXNA for my feed.

First off I thought this was great, since I’m sure it generated more traffic to my site, but then I thought that I’m sure it’d be annoying other blog authors.

If I were you, I’d go for option 4, and provide users with a little pop up that explains the difference between the feeds… :?

26 Apr 2004

Harold Bakker

I really like option 4. Sure, having multiple feeds can be distracting, but having read items pop up constantly even though you’ve already read them (sometimes four times) is more annoying.

As a lot of feeds are starting to add a commentcount the value of quickly seeing what’s truly new gets lost, losing the advantage of really simple syndication.

26 Apr 2004

Tim

+1 on option 4. I like new to mean new.

26 Apr 2004

Pete F.

I’m not a fan of the numbers in brackets – option 4 gets my vote too.

(Having said that, I don’t actually subscribe to any “comments only” feeds, but that doesn’t stop me clicking through to the story if I’m interested in seeing what others have put — or if I plan to contribute myself.)

26 Apr 2004

DD

You should do: 2. Get all retro and forget the comment count all together.

… nah just kidding. ;-)

In my opinion, you should switch to the idea of: 3. Provide an alternative version of the feeds without the comment count would make each camp happy, but would be more confusing when subscribing (which feed to chose?)

I see alot of online blogs are doing this now, and so far it seems the popular way to go.

26 Apr 2004

Dave

I think option 5 is the best, but you should do 3. The problem with 4 is that people might only be following comments on some posts and not others. People reading a feed like it is now can quickly see if posts they’re watching have new comments and ignore ones they’re not watching.

I think comment management is the next big area weblog software should be dealing with. Lots and lots of posts on lots and lots of weblogs could have better discussion on them if people had a better was to follow the conversations. Email notification doesn’t scale well, and no one’s come up with a good alternative solution (that I’ve seen) yet.

26 Apr 2004

Lars

4 oh 4!

I already subscribe to five or six comment feeds.

Providing an indication of what post each comment belongs to is something I miss with most of the feeds I’ve seen though (including a majority of the ones I subscribe to), so that’s on my wishlist too if you decide to go the No. 4 route.

26 Apr 2004

Mike Jones

I hate comment only feeds and don’t subscribe to them anymore because of two reasons:
1. I then get comments for post I long stopped caring about (including ones that are being spammed)
2. I lose the understanding of the ‘flow’ of conversation because the comment is out of context.

I like the way you do it at the moment because it means I get into the comments more as opposed to a lot of sites where I forget about the post once its read. I would personally go with 3. because I don’t think readers are as thick as we make them sound sometimes. A little “Whats the difference” pop-up isn’t going to kill anybody and your certainly eloquent enough Drew to make it easy to understand.

The only bad thing I would say about the comment number in subject thing is I open Bloglines and me thinks “oooo a new exciting post from Drew” then “Doh! Just another Page 23 comment” ;]

26 Apr 2004

Lars

Forgot to mention that in addition to having an overall comment feed, you could offer comment feeds for each post.

There’s your number 5.

26 Apr 2004

waylman

I like number 3 as well. I’d explain why, but Mike Jones already has above. Couldn’t have said it better myself Mike.

26 Apr 2004

Daniel Jarrett

I find it very annoying, so please don’t choose 1).

27 Apr 2004

Drew

I’ve turned off the comment count for the time being. Apologies if the action itself has notified you of 10 new posts!

I’ll see if I can implement an alternative in the next few days.

03 May 2004

hass

Drew, can you explain to a non-programmer how to turn off the comment count?

03 May 2004

hass

Sorry, I just grabbed your rss feed using the Firefox RSS reader extension, when I tried to save the feed title the lt, gt symbols caused a parsing error, the atom feed works fine.

03 May 2004

Lisa

I like comments only feeds. But I prefer for them to have an excerpt (say 1-2 lines) of the post and the preceding comments, so that I know the context.

So I’m all for option 4… ;)

07 Jun 2004

Marcus Tucker

Option 3 please! The status quo is rather annoying… makes it hard to see the wood for all the trees… ;)