Website Comments - Reply Feature Please!

Hi Perch, thanks for the idea. I'll refer this to Dave for consideration.

We've done a couple reply mods to it before but we've never had two clients agree on what "reply" should look like and how it works.

The issues are around: nesting: needs to have a visual design for an unknown limit of nesting, display: needs to not go off the right hand side of the screen.  Or if we only allow one level of nesting then it's where to put the comments (under the parent), and how to do paging (do we show the parent on subsequent pages), and where to link people who are "subscribed" to a thread (email updates) when there's a new post (do we link them to the end of the thread, or to the middle under the parent comment).

Interestingly enough, some people are actually very "anti-nesting", there's a lot of discussion about it on the internet as it relates to messages boards.  For our forums we decided to go with a flat layout.

But back to the comments plugin, we've even done custom mods where people can "reply" to email notifications to a comment and then have that reply be added as a comment, and then we get to deal with stripping off email signatures and dealing with vacation bounce messages and spam, all getting auto posted as comments, etc.

It's not like we can't sort it all out, but the above is why you'll see a lot of our plugins are simple.  We're trying to follow the Apple model of simple and very well designed, focused on most common use cases that are going to support the largest number of users.

That said, if you have a client who has the budget for some more customized, we might have some code around that we could build off of.

Cheers!

Hi, Dave -

I understand your thinking entirely. Often less is more. In this instance, however, I think one extra step might be useful. Take a look at this comments page on a popular UK newspaper;

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/12/letter-ernest-hemingway-wife-mary-house-cuba-finca-vigia

You may need to scroll down to the bottom...

I like this because there is only one level of indent - even when people reply to a reply. When someone does reply to a reply, the system shows the name of the user the person is replying to. This acts as a link to their post - which is a really nice feature and avoids all the endless nesting issues.

The "recommendation" arrow on the right of the post is a nice bonus too.

I would like to replicate all these features in the WSC plugin. I would have to fund it myself but hope I would be able to sell it clients further down the line.

Do-able?

Perch

Hi Perch,

Yea, absolutely do-able.  Drop me an email with a link to this post and a project you want to use it on and we can discuss more.  I'm at dave@interactivetools.com.

Thanks!