For many blogs, managing blog comments actually often means deleting spam comments. For others, entries may get many comments and it can be daunting for readers to wade through the piles of comments in order to find the gems.
Here’s some strategies for improved readability when dealing with large numbers of comments:
- Highlight your comments - so they stand out from all other commenters’ comments. We use this on IdolBlog, which was built using Drupal. It helps when you’re clarifying issues, responding to questions, or stepping in to calm down a discussion. It helps others to scan through the pile of comments too. Here’s a Wordpress plugin which will do this for you.
- Provide visual cues - by adding a mini icon (what’s know as a Gravatar or Favatar or Comvatar, depending on how the icon is obtained) which is always the same for a commentor, one is able to scan comments more quickly. You can see whether only a few people are leaving a tonne of comments back and forth (especially ones which argue regularly) or whether the post is attracting a wide variety of commenters. See the Gravatar, Favatar and Comvatar plugins for Wordpress.
- Show what’s new - forums have done this well in the past by indicating the number of new comments since your last visit. Drupal offers this for all commented on content. There’s a Wordpress plugin for unread comments. Of course, comment RSS feeds or email notifications can be used to track new comments on posts that interest you too.
- Split things up - I’m sure you’ve all been to a post which has hundreds of comments and it takes forever to load. Paginate your comments once there’s too many to load on a single page.
- Newest first - this one can be a little confusing for your visitors as it’s not the norm. We’ve tried it on IdolBlog and there are groups who prefer having the newest comments listed at the top, and others who prefer the standard of having the newest comments at the bottom. While posts are shown in reverse chronological order, reading a conversation in reverse order might not be appropriate. In some cases though, it can be handy to reverse the order of comments. (We now offer members the choice of the order they list comments on IdolBlog.)
- Distinguish Trackbacks - Wordpress mixes these all up and sometimes it can be rather confusing if commenters are discussing a post to be “interrupted” by a trackback. Create a different style for your trackbacks to help reduce the lack of flow.
- Rate comments - Like Slashdot, enable comments to be rated with a user-defined filter which hides comments below a certain threshold. Helps sort the wheat from the chaff. Alternatively, text size, text colour and background colour could be altered so as to “quieten” unimportant voices and enhance important contributions - more useful when dealing with large amounts of comments than displaying a score beside the comments.
Remember the trick here is to help improve readability of large numbers of comments. Less clutter is better. I haven’t seen a plugin for major blogging tools (apart from Drupal which does this). - Nested comments - This can be a little confusing if you’re not used to threaded comments but wonderful if your commenters frequently go off in little tangents, or have mini-conversations which aren’t relevant to everyone. See this Wordpress plugin.
- Editable comments - Blog commenters often muck up an original comment and post a comment straight afterwards to fix the first, or add an after-thought. If comments were editable, this would be greatly reduced.
The problem here is when someone leaves a provocative or controversial comment, then comes back and changes or deletes what they initially said. This can make others out to look stupid or can confuse newcomers to the conversation. We get around this by allowing editable comments on IdolBlog in conjunction with nested comments. If someone has already responded to their comment, they are unable to edit it. If no-one has yet, they can. - Categorise comments - I’ve been thinking about this recently but I haven’t yet seen an implementation of it. If an idea were floated on a post, with the post author asking for feedback on the idea, often this is done by way of a mixture of blog comments. Sometimes, a poll may be used and the poll may also allow commenting on it. However, while an overall tally of the percentage of people for/against an idea is available at-a-glance, the reasons why people are for/against the idea are all mixed together.
If comments were categorisable (such as agree/disagree/neutral/suggestion), then these could be displayed differently (such as a different background colour) or even separately physically (left, right, middle). At the end, a list of reasons for and against the idea could be found at a glance too.
Categorised comments would be invaluable in other circumstances too, e.g. political blogs (which candidate/party the commenter supports). In some cases, categories would be replaced by more flexible tags. You a post you could specifc the type of tags you’re looking for (relevant to the post) - e.g. affiliation.
I’d appreciate any feedback on this concept of tagging/categorising comments. Would you find it useful? How would you envisage using it?
If you’ve seen other ways of improving the readability of large numbers of comments on blogs (or other systems), I’d love to heard them!
your thoughts
.derek
nice read. seeing as though a few posts on uneasysilence were beginning to get out of control, i was thinking of a new method to make comment browsing a little more friendly. i liked the idea of “paginating” comments.
Chrono Cr@cker
Interesting and Innovative.. The official CC I&I Trademark is sealed.. Back on topic, you’ve almost covered 90% of the things that we can do to comments that there probably isn’t much else, but still let me try to get a couple of things that I thought it.
1) Categorize Comments::
This has struck me before, but in a different angle. You see, most of the comments about a post are probably either - Suggestions, Help, Criticism and Compliments. (We’ll leave the trackbacks out for now, I’ll cover them later). Having a simple drop-down menu where users can choose what type their comments are would be better than using the word “Categories”…
2) Trackbacks::
Most users don’t even bother looking at trackbacks, and why should they. Trackbacks distract them sometimes and some of my friends have no idea what the heck they are and get confused. So, why should a Trackback be posted as a comment? Instead the comments section can be divided into 2 columns with the left showing comments and the right trackback, or all trackbacks should be listed at the bottom and at the end of the main post there should be a link like “See the Blogs Linking Here”, which moves to a the bottom part or arranging the tracks differently.
3) Long comments like these are really not wanted by half the readers… For example, someone who asked for help from you.. So why not using DHTML/Javascript, cut off the part of the comment and have link which upon clicking opens the full comment just below that.. Yes, you guessed it… just like the [more] thing in WP but this doesn’t open it in a new page but the same one.
4) WP has an usergroup called Commentor.. Why net let each commenter get something more than just commenting.. Give him/her, the format of the comment, like color and style.
5) Last, lets say there are 100’s of comments and I’ve navigated through them.. Then the 2nd time I come, I don’t even look at the first 100 comments but instantly jump on to the 101′th comment.. So, why should the rest be there.. If there is an option for new comments only, would be great or ofcourse users can be provided the choice to read the comments in ascending or descending order depending on their preference.
Otherwise your ideas are nice, I specially do like the Edit Comments and Pagination but the best is by far the Rating, but of course, only the Blogger must do that.
Someone get Matt from Wordpress inside here…..
Rachel
Thanks for the feedback Chrono - awesome food for thought.
I like your categorisation options very much! I’m trying to think what would one do if more than one category applies (as may often be the case).
Regarding Trackbacks, I like the fact that MovableType does keep them separate. Trackbacks are often referred to as places where the conversation “continues” although I usually find the automatic body of the trackback comment isn’t that great. When I created the simple little Trackback plugin, I realised that Trackbacks and Pingbacks are just seen as comments by Wordpress… I’m going to have another look under the hood to see if it’s at all possible to separate them out and just show the URL links to them (not the body). Update: Found an internal function
get_comment_type(); ?>which will return comment/trackback/pingback. Voila! A way to display them separately and differently! I’ve updated mine to just show them differently now but will separate them shortly“Show new only” could be handy. It would be nice if there was a visual divider for old/new comments (a line or a different background color) if they were all listed.
Thanks again
Paul-Serge
Very interesting post; I’m immediatly going to install the highlight-your-comments-plugin for WordPress. Thanks!
Dennis Bullock
Excellent article. I will be working some of these things into my site soon. Thanks….
Chrono Cr@cker
Thanks Rach. Once I learn advanced PHP, I might even make those plugins. Back on, How is it that your comment appears yellow in the other post but not here?
And the trackback reduction is nice..
Blogsumer » Del.icio.us links van 29 januari 2006
[...] Improving the readability of large numbers of comments — cre8d design blog (tags: blogs comments) [...]
Rachel
I noticed that too Chrono - in the plugin information it says that it’ll only work on comments after the plugin is installed…
Brian Shih
Rachel,
Great article - it’s really nice to see actual articles on blog design and usability instead of sites that claim to be about design but are really just personal blogs of designers…
Subscribed!
Rachel
Thanks Brian
Improving Trackback display — cre8d design blog
[...] This post follows on from my nicer trackbacks plugin and post on improving comment section readability. [...]
Chrono Tron - 100% » Blog Archive » My Message to Wordpress
[...] If I had written, I would have also included this as well. Do be sure that you read my comment. [...]
Blogs & forums: different ways of looking at the same thing — cre8d design blog
[...] Of course, some features of forums would not be automatically built in and would need to be made available by way of plugins (e.g. if you wanted threaded comments, you’d grab the plugin discussed recently). User profile pages would substitute in for forum member pages. [...]
nate
Rachel,
Kudos on the article. It was very well thought out and has helped me think through some of the things that bug me about WP in some instances. I love WP as a platform, but there’s lots of improvements I’ve made.
Specifically, the link to the plugin to separate the logged in user/admin’s comments from the rest is great. I love that and found it very helpful in many other sites. Additionally, I love your idea and simple implementation with the trackbacks just using the title. That’s awesome and I’m definitely implementing that in my own blog today.
However, I disagree with some things. I tried out the gravatar/favatar/comvatar and think it clutters things up quite a bit. I don’t really care to use them either, as a commenter. I’m not sure what value they add either. But, hey, I’ve been wrong lots of times before.
Also, I’ve seen lots of discussion on pagination of comments, and I have to disagree with you. Scrolling is not a bad thing. It also lowers your bandwidth cost (no need for reloading), keeps everything simple and readable, and lowers the time it takes to find and read comments for users who don’t have a nice speedy connection like me (and you probably).
Last, rating comments: I guess that might be helpful if you used the ratings in some way, but otherwise it seems like a waste of time. Please tell me why I’m wrong here because I’d love to do it, but I don’t find the value in it. By “sorting the wheat from the chaff”, your forcing your readers to participate or just accept other people’s opinions of what a good comment is or what has value to them (I need to find another word other than “value”, sorry). I don’t like making my visitors have to work to find what they need.
Sorry for the rant, but I love that you got me to comment… and that’s the point eh?
Nate Ritter » Improving blog comments and coffee cup lids
[...] If you’re interested, the inspiration came from the gem of a site called cre8d-design.com. [...]
Rachel
Good points nate and thanks for your thoughts
The gravatar can clutter things up, or it can be a quick visual cue as to who’s commenting. Do you think it’s cluttering up my site?
I read a number of sites where the comments are in the hundreds per post and it’s really really slow to load the pages (here in New Zealand when we go over our “quota” for the day, we’re reduced to basically dialup… yes, it sucks! Most people here aren’t on very fast connections due to the cost.. but that’s another story). So, when I’m just interested in reading the post, and not the comments, I’d love the for pagination of large numbers of comments.
For rating of comments, even if it was just a simple filter where I reduce the size of comments where people have said asked an aside question to the blog’s author (irrelevant to everyone else), I’d find that useful when scanning comments.
What’s wrong with blog commenting (and what you can do about it)
[...] threaded comments might make it easier to follow the conversation (Wordpress: use this plugin). Some other suggestions for the readability of comments on this great blogging design blog. [...]
TechCrunch Redesign Update: ProBlogger Blog Tips
[...] A few days back I linked to the design saga around the TechCrunch Redesign where the redesign of this popular blog came under significant critique. The design was done by Rachel Cunliffe from Cre8d but it was pretty obvious that there was some level of different perspectives between designer and blog owner if you look at the post announcing the redesign by Mike and the comment thread of Rachel’s announcement. [...]