Q&A Friday #104: The Comments Section

by John Hawkins | February 25, 2011 1:41 am

Question: StanW 10 hours ago
Would you consider any of the following:
1) Returning the comment counters to the main page.
2) Requiring all persons posting to register with Discus in order to post?
3) Having a daily “Open” Thread?

Answer: 1) Returning the comment counters to the main page.

The comment count dropped off because of a particularly annoying bug in Disqus. I tried — and failed to get it fixed in this version of RWN. However, I expect that when the new design of RWN goes into place in the next week or so, there should be a work-around in place that will handle that issue. (PS: The people who donated during the fund raiser have already seen a rudimentary version of the new page and let me tell you, it looks really spiffy.)

2) Requiring all persons posting to register with Discus in order to post?

I actually had it set to do that in the first place and I did not realize that feature had turned off. I did turn that back on just now although people should also be able to login with their Twitter and Facebook IDS, too.

However, let me tell you: This accomplishes a lot less than you might think. If you know what you’re doing, you can hide an IP pretty easily. So, if you’re obsessive enough to keep going through the trouble of creating accounts, you can keep posting, banned or not. There’s one person on this board now who, back when I had an older system, created 100+ accounts to get around bans — and, yes, he’s still around and complaining non-stop about “trolls.”

3) Having a daily “Open” Thread?

I’m not opposed to doing that if people want it. If you’d be interested in commenting in a daily open thread, let me know in the comments section of this post.

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