Re: Proposal for a comments system



On Sun, 2010-04-04 at 16:08 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> We've talked before about having a system to allow users to
> comment on help pages. I attended a session about this last
> week at the WritersUA conference. I think we're in a pretty
> good position to do this with Mallard. Here's my proposal.
> I'm trying to keep it as simple as possible.
> 
> We create a server that stores comments and allows users to
> submit comments. This will be a simple web application, but
> it won't have a public-facing web interface. It is designed
> to be used through Yelp or library.gnome.org.
> 
> Comments are submitted over HTTP. They contain a person's
> name, an optional email address (not published), and the
> text of the comment. Comment text is restricted to plain
> text with a character-count cutoff (~300ish characters).
> 
> To reduce spam, we can require a particular User-Agent in
> the HTTP request. This won't stop anyone who wants to spam
> our system specifically, but it will block general-purpose
> spambots.

General-purpose spambots could still operate through library.gnome.org,
if we're going to have commenting enabled there. Perhaps a CAPTCHA could
be used for the library.gnome.org interface?

> People with accounts will be able to log into the comments
> server with a web application. They will be able to close
> comments with a status like "resolved", "invalid", "spam",
> or "troll". Closed comments won't appear anymore. I don't
> think we need to be stingy about giving out accounts. If
> we could somehow tie it to git accounts, that would make
> life easier for us.

Would closed comments still be stored for reference purposes (like
closed bug reports)?

Probably also need a status for "duplicate".

> Comments are per-page, and also per-language. Translators
> will be able to translate comments into English. These will
> be tied together on the server, so that when we close the
> translated-into-English comment, the original is closed as
> well.

What's the purpose of having per-language, translated comments? As I
understand it, comments as you are proposing them are basically mini
bug-reports about the documentation, and are all meant to be resolved
through updates/extensions/improvements to the documentation. If that's
the case, why would the comments need translating?

Philip

> There are a number of benefits to doing this. We get real
> user feedback on what we're writing. That's huge. Because
> Yelp will have to ask the server for the comments for each
> page, we also get some metrics on which pages are visited
> most. And people tend to use things more when they're
> directly engaged.

Could we have some more detail on these ideas for page view statistics?
Should there be a way for people to opt out of their usage of help pages
being logged? (Don't know why anyone would, but it should be
considered.)

Regards,
Philip

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