23 Leben

— the life outside the frame


Tell us how our comments feel?

Published by steffentchr, March 11, 2010 in Tips & tricks. Commented once.

I’ve fallen into a bit of a black hole of development these past few days. Usually, we’re pretty focused on bringing you guys new features, but this week I’ve dedicated way too much time to make an existing 23 Video feature bet…. Well, I was going to say ‘better’, but let’s settle for ‘different’ for now.

I’ve never loved how comments work on 23 Video. Feature-wise they’re pretty awesome — you’ll get three different kinds of spam-protection, content monitoring, post-editing, notifications and more. But comments on 23 Video and Visualblog have always felt — well — wrong. In fact, the comment feature on 23 Photo Sharing just feels better, so I wanted to duplicate some of that feeling. (And, I’ll admit it, add a few extra features just to have something to tell the PR people upstairs: “No no no, the code monkeys aren’t wasting time down here. We’re building the future!”)

After days of tweaking, I still only have a prototype. It does all the same stuff you’ll know from 23 Video: You’ll still be writing your name and email alongside the comment; there’s still different spam-protection mechanisms in the browser; and there’s still a spam filter on the back-end. You can still get notifications and you can still delete a comment after it’s been posted. I’ve removed comment editing though, and there’s no threading or quoting.

There’s some new goodies as well: To lessen the burden of handling spam, users are now asked to complete a captcha to submit a comment flagged by the spam filters. We’ll be displaying user icons from Gravatar alongside comments. And it integrates with Facebook Connect. So you can log in using Facebook to avoid filling in name and email, and you can post a comment to your wall on Facebook.

So far, it’s all just a prototype — none of these improvement have made it into 23 Video yet. Before we go that far, I wanted to ask you: How does the new comment form feel to you?

Try out The Comment Form Prototype and post your impressions here. (And please, please, please. Don’t just try to comment. Try to break it.)