Social comments integrated with dlang.org

[Sönke Ludwig]

Am 29.12.2012 05:45, schrieb Jonathan M Davis:
> On Friday, December 28, 2012 23:36:09 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> All - please take a look at Sönke's integration of Disqus with dlang.org:
>>
>> http://vibed.org/temp/d-programming-language.org/phobos/std/algorithm/balanc
>> edParens.html
>>
>> What do you think? Again, I'm very much into the idea of integrating
>> community-provided content but I was hoping a more D-friendly thing,
>> like PHP documentation has PHP-friendly comments.
>>
>> In particular, I'm hoping to allow people to include code runnable
>> on-line in disqus comments. Is that possible?
>>
>> Other thoughts?
> 
> I confess that my initial reaction is that it's incredibly messy to have user 
> comments on documentation. It seems unprofessional to me, and if the 
> documentation isn't adequate, then I'd argue that it should be improved rather 
> than having stray users comment on it. This is API documentation, not a blog.
> 
> There's also the issue of the comments becoming outdated when the documenation 
> _is_ properly updated.
> 
> Maybe it's ultimately a good idea. I question it though.
> 
> - Jonathan M Davis
> 

We could also make the comments collapsed by default to clean up the page appearance. But regarding
professionalism, even Microsoft has user comments on MSDN:
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms632679%28VS.85%29.aspx>. Nothing keeps a moderator from
deleting outdated comments (you can have as many moderators as needed and can also enable
pre-moderation).

And frankly, in my experience such comments were immensely helpful in a number of cases on various
online documentation sites (including MSDN and ...PHP). They are like an in-place stack overflow
discussion that you don't have to search for, often with some real gems.