>> >> I have found that many of the "useless" comments show up as good Google >> searches when I'm looking up errors. This kind of behavior has been >> incredibly useful in the past for figuring out what to do with a bug I've >> encountered. Unfortunately, lately it's been much harder for me to use this >> approach because after I use the link in Google the comments are gone. This >> behavior wouldn't be a "big" deal except that AppDB only shows the top >> comments in the Google cache (and Google will eventually remove these >> pages), so there's no way to look at the responses for deleted comments >> (note: if we changed AppDB to feed Google all of the comments that would be >> really nice). >> >> Anyway, I would definitely appreciate a 25 threads/page system - the current >> "infinite comments" system is rather unweildly to navigate. Personally, I >> would prefer that rather than delete these comments that comments get marked >> as "outdated". If outdated comments weere pushed to the end of the list, >> and clearly marked that they are outdated, then they could still be useful >> for historical purposes without interfering with the usability of the site. >> >> Erich Hoover >> ehoo...@mines.edu >> >> > I personally think a Slashdot style system (like mentioned earlier) is > perfect for this. If users rated posts up and down, and there is a > customizable threshold above which the comments are visible. Then the > most relevant and useful posts would always be the ones people could > see, outdated/irrelevant posts would drop below the threshold and only > the subject would be visible. You could even use simple AJAX to grab > the comments that were below the threshold when they are requested, > which would save on bandwidth/page load for pages with a large number > of comments. > > Luke. >
Replacing the comments system in the appdb has been a long standing goal. The plan was to take an existing system and interface it into the appdb so we could leverage a project that was designed to manage threads/comments etc. I would be willing to provide consulting help to anyone interested in working on that task. Chris
