Social comments integrated with dlang.org

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Saturday, 29 December 2012 at 17:48:06 UTC, Andrei 
Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 12/29/12 10:22 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>> Sönke has listed the advantages provided by Disqus. I'll list 
>> a few
>> disadvantages (some of which may be obvious) for consideration:
> [snip]
>
> Good points. I, too, think a customized, highly integrated 
> version of forum.dlang.org would be preferable.

I think we should not be too quick to dismiss the wiki option. It 
wouldn't be hard to create a minimal MediaWiki skin for the 
purpose of inclusion in dlang.org pages as an iframe.

One common pattern I noticed in the PHP boards is when one 
commenter tries to one-up the code fragment posted by another 
(and repeat). As a result, you can find a half dozen variants of 
code attempts of the same purpose. Comments pointing out 
criticisms in whatever variant may get lost. Voting and sorting 
by votes helps with this somewhat, but is still a far shot from 
true collaboration that a wiki can provide.

If contributed content is on an editable page, it's much easier 
to organize it. E.g. bulky examples can be moved to a subpage, or 
perhaps to some other place on the wiki (e.g. cookbook or 
whatnot) and linked to from the page visible on dlang.org.

MediaWiki also gives us great moderation. Vandalism is easy to 
undo and vandals are easy to block, and history has shown that 
wiki communities can defeat vandalism as a problem without 
requiring some authoritary moderation force.

The one problem I can think of is that discussion is not very 
intuitive (e.g. signing posts and "threading" is done by 
convention). There are some MediaWiki extensions that provide a 
simpler interface, however.

I think the ideal solution would be some combination of both wiki 
and discussion, something like StackOverflow.

Back to discussing the forum idea:

> Perhaps integration with newsgroup wouldn't be necessary, i.e. 
> no need to make posts made on the documentation pages appear on 
> the regular fora.

The posts could be backed by a separate newsgroup created for the 
purpose. Those willing to contribute could do so from the comfort 
of their NNTP/email client.

> Do you think it would be easy to implement and maintain the 
> features I discussed in http://goo.gl/G4pJ9? Let's not forget 
> that we'd benefit of future improvements to disqus (if any) by 
> default, whereas if we build it we need to maintain and improve 
> it.

Sure, but OTOH we can't improve a third-party service if we don't 
like something in it.

> 2. PHP has compulsive moderation before posting, we don't seem 
> to have any. Is it possible to add moderation before (or at 
> least after) posting? I see Sönke has a "mod" tag next to his 
> name.
>
> 3. Both allow anonymous comments, but since PHP is compulsively 
> moderated that's less of an issue. Can we require registration 
> (disqus/facebook/twitter/g+) for posting?

Do you think that misbehavior (requiring moderation) would become 
a problem on dlang.org comments, despite that it's not a (big) 
problem on the forums?

> 4. PHP's comments with code have it formatted beautifully just 
> like the main site. Disqus does support some D apparently but 
> an older version. Is it possible to add some styling so we 
> format code snippets just the same as our current runnable 
> examples?

Sure. The greatest hurdle will likely be the bikeshedding over 
the syntax to indicate a code block :)

> 5. Both have voting, and PHP sorts comments in decreasing order 
> by upvotes. Can we also sort the same? Also, can we add some 
> randomness (e.g. randomly push one of the comments in a top 
> position) such that new good content has a chance to be upvoted?

Sounds easy enough, bar the plentifully-discussed challenges of 
implementing voting systems.