New, improved, comments!

Our comments have been updated and improved with a new comments policy, more informative information about what code can be used (including Textile), and a new live preview of your comments! Unfortunately, the live preview does not render Textile syntax – only HTML, but if you are hip enough to use Textile you probably don’t need no preview anyway.

Feel free to use this thread to test out the new features, give Textile a whirl, offer suggestions, or tell us what you like or don’t like about the new comments policy.

Site News

7 thoughts on “New, improved, comments!”

  1. I am just P.A.P. to help you try out your new Comments system. Let me give it a little putting through its pacesworkout and I’ll tell you how it is.

    and a new live preview of your comments!

    Alas, the live preview interferes with actually typing into the textarea. Once my commennt has exceded the inital space, either by virtue of its length, or by having a long unbreakable string (such as the ‘Comments’ link above) then I have trouble seeing what’s happening. Also, I note that the tooltips that popup on the abbr and acronym codes are truncated at the first space.

    I will not speak to Textile as that is an abomination perpetrated by simpletons too weak to type in HTML and their programmer enablers.

  2. It isn’t the fault of live preview, but I also see that your stylesheet has code styled in italic. Traditionally, code is rendered in monospace which I am unable to make your comments render. I’m just saying™. At least it let me make a ™ 😉

  4. Craig. Thanks for testing things out!

    I don’t see the problems you describe (with text area and tool tips) with Firefox on Mac OS X, but I’ll see if I can figure out some way to deal with them. (Code in monospace makes sense too.)

  5. Actually, I quite like the “Textile syntax”:http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/ and we use it on CriticalWorld’s “blog”:http://blog.criticalworld.net/ . It’s not as intuitive as most incarnations of “WikiSyntax”:http://instiki.org/show/WikiSyntax but it’s quite useful. Too bad the live preview doesn’t render Textile, but that’s ok.
    As for the comments policy, it may sound like common sense but it’s good to have one. In the spirit of the site, it might be useful to state:
    * Differences between comments and posts (not everybody understands what a post is).
    * The goals of the comments section (in anthropological terms).
    * The role of the Great Eight (Rex, Antti, Chris, Kerim, Nancy, Oneman, Ozma, Tak).
    * Our roles as lowly commentators. 😉

    Keep up the good work!

  6. Alexandre,

    I just looked at it again, and I think the About page has a pretty clear statement as to who we are. And while I’m always for making things as explicit as possible, I am not convinced that the distinction between posts and comments is so unclear that it requires explication. As for as the role of commentators, it seems presumptuous to define that in advance. I prefer defining it negatively as I do in the current comments policy, since certain things are clearly out-of-bounds.

  7. I think I’ve encountered the text-area bug Craig was discussing. It happens when you enter several paragraphs of text into a text area – the scroll seems to keep jumping to the top, rather than staying at the bottom. I’ll have to fix this somehow – or remove the preview plugin…

Comments are closed.