Comments are dead, discussions are live!

Posted by Jesse Andrews on Nov 16, 2008

Commenting on scripts has been popular, there has been 53,095 comments on 8,218 scripts since June 20th, 2005. Their success has come at a cost of usefulness. To bring order back to comments, comments are now threaded (eg, topics and posts).

All the existing comments have been archived into a locked thread (this is so people respond in new threads).

Now there can be different conversations about translations, ideas, bugs, and so on.

Lots of improvements are needed: the script author should have their posts highlighted, we will need a method of community based moderation, search, feeds, ... But like the introduction of reviews, I want to do it in steps.

As always you can join us in the forum to discuss the change and now you can follow @userscripts to talk with me about userscripts.org issues.

You could comment on this post if you were logged in.

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Posted Nov 17, 2008

Never seen this coming.

I think this can have big potential, if you include at least your other suggestions. It's now just to minimal.

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Posted Nov 17, 2008

Nice, I like it, great work, thank you.
When you have time can you also fix the User->Comments to show also the new threads/comments.

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Posted Nov 18, 2008

Hi Jesse, just a little bug, the old comments are shown in chronological order instead of reversed chronological order, it means the oldest comment is on the top and the newest comment is the last one.

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Posted Nov 18, 2008

What happens now with /home/comments? It no longer tracks new comments... will it be possible to track new posts on script threads there? That'd be really helpful, or we'll have to make a userscript to check comments again ^__^

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Jesse Andrews article's author
Posted Nov 18, 2008

aquilax, avg, those fixes are coming...

also the idea is it is more forum like, and there is link to the last page, so the comments are in the order they were made now. I think there should be sorting options though (buttons to change your default ordering)... I don't have time yet though.

Yell at me after I fix the /home/comments and /users/comments ...

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Jesse Andrews article's author
Posted Nov 19, 2008

avg, /home/comments now work, as well I fixed the feed for comments on your scripts.

Aquilax, users comments should work, but the numbers are a little off here and there now.

The feed for comments on your scripts is updated to have posts, but the links suck - sorry - that will need fixed.

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Posted Nov 19, 2008

gracias! :O)

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Posted Nov 20, 2008

You know what? This site is becoming amazing! Nice work Jesse!

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Posted Nov 20, 2008

Very cool. The site is now looking pretty damn good. Good stuff, Jesse.

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Jesse Andrews article's author
Posted Nov 21, 2008

Thanks, I try. I know when I see something I like but that doesn't mean I can create good designs quickly.

It takes me longer than I wish to improve the look and feel.

Right now I hate the header, the footer, the sidebar, and of course the homepage and the script listings. I figured since 90% of the page views are on the script pages polishing them first would be best.

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Posted Nov 22, 2008

Some people just take a year and then release a totaly new version of the whole site at once.
I find it much more fun when you release just parts that have overhauled. This way I come and check much more often to look if you've changed something. :p
Keep it up.

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Posted Nov 22, 2008

hi jesse,
can you do that the newest comment will be on the top?
it's more comfortable...

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Jeton User
Posted Nov 23, 2008

Hey Jesse.

Just stumbled on this very useful extension for Firefox. It apparently shows you available scripts on an actual page that you visit.

You might want to give it a plug here.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/...

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Jesse Andrews article's author
Posted Nov 23, 2008

@yabash, it is on my wall to work on.

@Jeton, ya, I've been talking with the author - several things I need to do to help him is written on my wall as well.

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Posted Nov 24, 2008

The new discussions now link to the topic instead of a permalink for the posts in the rss feeds. If it's a simple enough fix, could you please link these back to permalinks. Also if possible can you do this with the forum posts feed too, as I guess that will probably be quite similar now.

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Posted Dec 2, 2008

Hi, not sure if this has been reported already but there seems to be a bug in the code that counts the number of comments on a script. The comment count is inconsistent across pages.

When I go to my "Script Management" page, one of my scripts has 20 comments. When I view the page for that script the "Discussions" tab and the "Recently Updated Topics" table say it has 23 comments. When I click on "Discussions" tab, the page that loads shows an RSS feed with 23 comments, but the table below shows 2 threads with a total of 21 comments.

So that's 3 different totals depending on where I look.

Vaughan

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Posted Dec 5, 2008

I've just noticed that since the comments system was changed to the discussions system, these blog posts are the only pages that have comments. This means that the Recent Comments section on the main page contains only the recent comments on here. I'm not sure if you're aware of it, but I guess it's another thing to add to your list, Jesse.

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Posted Dec 12, 2008

Very nice work Jesse!