A few days ago, we asked you to test the new comments section we’d been working on. Now, we’ve made about nine or ten extra tweaks based on the feedback and the new comments section is online on 23 Video. The upgrade includes better spam protection, it features buddy icons from Gravatar, it is faster — and (at least to our fingertips) it feels a lot better. And then there’s integration with Facebook Connect.
Connecting and posting to Facebook
I don’t want to bore anyone the details of Connect (and if you’re familiar with the interwebs, this probably isn’t the first you’re hearing of it…), but it is basically a way for Facebook users to use their profiles elsewhere on the web. In this case, Connect will let users link their Facebook profiles to comments posted on a 23 Video site. This means that they won’t need to key in their name and contact information, that they’ll have their buddy icons posted alongside their comment — and, most importantly, users can re-post their comments on their Facebook walls.
When a user re-posts a comment to Facebook, we’ll even attach your video for playback directly on the user’s wall in order to drive more traffic back to your video site.
We’ll reveal a few more Facebook tricks over the coming weeks, so there’s no link to activate the feature under Distribution yet. If you want to use it on your site though, go to http://your.domain.com/distribution/facebook-app to set it up.
And also… the default buddy icon
When there’s no icon to show for a commenter, we’ll display a simple, default buddy icon. The default icon will change over the coming days (it’s a little generic for our tastes), but you can also set up your own default icon. Simply upload a (quadratic) file called no-buddy.gif under Design → Files to add a little of your own flavour.
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