TheAgitator.com
Comments Complaints/Suggestions Thread
Saturday, October 10th, 2009I’ll turn off the LivePodium comment system for this post so you can register your complaints and suggestions on how to improve it.
Please be constructive. That is, specific complaints and suggestions are helpful. “Go back to the old system” is not. The goal here is to give Fred at LivePodium some feedback to improve his product.
Fred sent me the following message last week, updating the changes he’s made so far, and listing the changes he’s hoping to make soon:
Here is a list of items fixed to date:1. Text is selectable for cut and paste
2. Mouse wheel scroll support
3. Support of basic HTML tags
4. Reply to text displayed at bottom of Create Comment
5. Cursor and/or focus better positioned at several locations
6. Chatroom count displayed in button
7. Online status in bold
8. Several other minor items
Short term (within a week) items to fix:
1. Full auto login with a log out option
2. Save firewall settings
3. Fix over voting issue
4. Fix mouse out issue on scroll bar
Future feature list:
1. Comment editing
2. Rich text editor with URL autodiscovery, spell check, etc.
3. HTML alternative you can opt out of flash (already planned for mobile devices, SEO, etc.)
4. Full list display (no frame effect within flash)
5. Plus several other ideas
Note to anti-flash crowd:
Flash/Flash Media Server was chosen for the real time message protocol (RTMP) that allows real time communication and online presence. You are not going to make that happen in JavaScript. Many of the complaints mentioning flash are really directed at the user interface design. Flash can be made to look like any UI. But regardless, the alternate HTML interface should address all your concerns.
this is cool that you’re taking input. its what makes your site so good. i had a few problems:
1-i couldn’t use the comment system at work. it trip my security system. had to read at home, therefore a much duller lunch hour.
2-the comments are a little dizzying in terms of format. the sophistication borders on obfuscation.
but i guess growth is hard, so stay with it. it sounds like Fred has good ideas already.
I also can’t use anything that needs Flash at work.
Personally, I don’t like threads that “nest”. I like all the posts laid out in order of posting. Site designers think that “nesting” encourages conversations, but it doesn’t. It just encourages large parts of the total discussion to disappear into black holes.
But since neither of those items are on the table I guess I’ll just take whatever.
Honestly, I think the system has made huge improvements in one week. I have noticed, tho:
1: Hyperlinks are now available, but they do not follow the user’s browser rules. For instance, I have Left-Click to open the link in the same tab (Unless overruled by the link itself), and middle-click to open in a new tab. Middle click does not work at all within the LP window.
scrolling is a pain in the ass
Make it possible to click on the scroll bar instead of dragging the slider. (Or as suggested above, get rid of the frame altogether). Mouse wheel for me (firefox 3.0) kind of sucks since it scrolls the main page before it scrolls the flash inset meaning it chops off a lot of the frame.
Also there is a lot of redundant space between comments when you count the horizontal whitespace and two (?!) headers which could easily be merged into one (and even be made narrower).
For people with ultraportables and nettops (like 1024×768 and even less), this waste really hurts.
I’m running Linux on a netbook and don’t have much processing power. Even though YouTube works on my computer, for some reason, the flash comment system doesn’t work for me. My computer isn’t by any means fast or a standard setup, but I can’t comment with the new system from my netbook, so I’m just waiting for an html version.
This is simply not true. Meebo would love to show you how wrong that is (and there are many more like it; see see, for instance, Campfire, a commercial real-time chat application sold and used by businesses everywhere).
1. Permalinks to individual comments
2. Middle-click = open in new tab (in background ideally).
3. Pay a good graphic designer to overhaul LP. Bad design hurts usability and bugs users even if they don’t recognize it.
4. LivePodium public issue tracker (where this kind of feedback should go rather than Radley’s database)
I’ll be much happier when the HTML-based alternative is ready, since Flash doesn’t usually work well (or at all) through some privacy proxies, etc.
Also, note that scrollwheel still doesn’t work for firefox on mac (my method of reading). Would like to see that work.
One major thing I’d like is not using only one window for it. I can’t currently have two discussions for two posts open at once. That’s a hindrance that should be easy to fix.
Claimed fixed: basic html tags. Please identify which tags are supported. As of today, these tags do not appear to be supported:
b, i, em, strong, strike, tt, sup, sub, big, small, code, blockquote
Not on list: long posts with no line breaks are formatted in a pane one line too small, and must be mousewheeled to see last line. Posts of exactly two lines can be mousewheeled within their pane as well.
Not on list: control-Z
I for one would be enchanted if the comments were embedded on the page rather than on another website.
Agreed. But if I can cut and past and use HTML tags and links (like I’m doing here) I can just forego threaded comments and keep all of my posts in chronological order.
A “Quote” feature that places a comment in blockquotes (with or without attribution) for you to respond to at the bottom of the page is much preferable to me.
A preview option is really my only other complaint. I looked at this comment and think I have it right but there is no way to be confident without preview. I ofter end up looking like an HTML and English language retard sans preview.
As noted above, I don’t have flash installed on my main work browser, so any flash based functionality is worthless to me since.
Even if I can’t leave a comment, I’d like to be able to view the comments without needing flash.
Almost every other poster in the last thread asked to get rid of the frame.
I won’t comment here using the new system until the frame is gone. Sorry Radley.
I am running Windows Vista Home Premium on my very powerful desktop PC (gotta have that power to play WoW without issues) I usually visit this site via AOL rather than IE (so sue me, it’s prettier and the email system is to my liking).
My issues with the new comment system:
1. My mouse’s scrollwheel doesn’t work on the page or within the comment box, so if a line is below the bottom edge of the box, I can’t get to it to read it (I thought posts were being truncated until someone mentioned the scrollwheel).
2. As Fluffy (#2) said, I do not like the nesting comments feature in such a small area of the screen (at least on digg I can see the entire nest, or nearly so in popular content), not just two or three posts of it. I have found this setup we are using for these comments on the new comment system to be very usable, especially when posters refer back to the number of the post to which they are responding. Which brings me to
3. The comments on the new system are not numbered for reference.
4. The only place I online chat is in WoW (unless one of my grandkids chats me up on facebook), so that is not a feature I find necessary or useful in this context.
If I think of any more, I’ll come back and relte them.
Oh yeah, an edit function will be very nice for us slydexic types. That way when I screw up a comment because there is no preview I can at least fix it after the fact.
I think we should alll get cookies for helping Fred out with the op-testing
Except for Fluffy.
relate
I’m glad to hear there’s going to be a plain HTML alternative. I think I understand what Radley is trying to do here with the interactive features, and more power to him.
As a reader and sometimes commenter, what I want is simply for text to act like any other text in my web browser, so I can interact with it in all the ways I’m familiar with HTML text behaving. I think this sums up a lot of what Fred is calling UI issues. If the flash interface is clumsier, slower or less intuitive than regular HTML, I’m not likely to read or contribute to comments.
You can consider this “anti-flash” or unconstructive or just sour grapes from a steady reader but infrequent commenter.
Scroll wheel still doesn’t work. And this is simply insulting:
I do software development on the web for a living. I *know* what I’m talking about. There is *nothing* on live podium that can’t be done using Javascript. Period, end of story. I think somebody fell for the marketing literature from Adobe. I can only assume that whoever wrote this doesn’t have a Facebook account.
This could *easily* be put together using PHP or Ruby on Rails on the backend with jQuery to help along with the Javascript. It’s been done before.
I’m sorry Fred spent a bunch of $ buying software that he doesn’t need. I would recommend to him that he sit down with an expert *first* next time, it would save time and money. If the expert is recommending you go buy Adobe middleware for a simple comment system and chatroom, he’s not an expert.
Most of the problems that people have are directly the result of Flash. Many – if not most – of the features that people are looking for would automatically exist if he had just used a standard HTML interface. Others, such as the url autodiscovery and such, would be easily covered by any number of libraries or modules available for the common programming languages. These are not UI issues – they are flash issues.
Using these tools would also have allowed him to run the server side of this on any number of cheap platforms other than Windows.
My two cents.
If you’re committed to using RTMP, that’s probably true. But there are plenty of web applications that provide real-time chat using JavaScript. For example: Meebo and Cover It Live (which this site has used). The J in AJAX, after all, stands for JavaScript.
My fundamental objection to Flash applications is that they’re disconnected from the web. A browser sets aside some space on a page for a Flash interpreter, and can’t see anything that happens inside of that box. Although the Flash application may allow for hyperlinks to the outside world, the outside world can’t link into the Flash application. If I want to refer to someone’s comment on theagitator.com from my web site, I can’t just link to it. I have to link to the page containing the comment, and tell readers to scroll down and look for the nth post by so-and-so.
Re: Real-time comment updating.
F5 is not all that hard. Combined with removing nested comments (for the reasons already listed above in #2), it’d be great. I hate nested comments because it requires semi-active reading of the entire comment body every time you want to see if there’s anything new. Sequential posting resolves this problem and referencing a comment number (as is done now on this site) is a simple fix for creating a “conversation”.
I guess I’m in the minority since I like the nesting of comments. What I don’t care for is the lack of preview and the inability to search for text. I agree with others that I don’t like the frame and the format is too busy.
Sigh. I screwed up my links in a post about the importance of web connectedness. How embarrassing. Let me try again:
Meebo
Cover It Live
has used
I don’t want to login. It is a waste of my time and adds no value for me.
Way off topic –
I just saw an ad on the side. Hugh Downs is still alive! Wow. Since I remember him from childhood (Concentration) I figgered he’d have punted the pail by now.
You do realize the irony, don’t you, of telling your customers that “I know you want it, so tough,” on a blog devoted at least in part to the market-driven notion that if the customers want something that the suppliers will respond?
Me too.
So, I guess going forward I won’t be able to read comments on the iPhone, and probably most mobile devices.
Too bad.
/Jay
But I seldom comment. This is the first in many years.
I like the old comment system for a very simple reason: it works for me, and the new one doesn’t work so well for me.
I use Firefox on dialup. I usually browse with images OFF. When I want to see some particular image, as of Radley’s excellent photographs, I load it separately in another tab.
With the old comment system, I just open the comments (from the link in the original post) into a new tab, then read and scroll down. Very simple, no muss, no fuss, no dancing doggies.
I can’t really use Flash well on dialup, and I usually avoid fancypants presentations that eat my limited bandwidth while delivering nothing more than eye candy or gee whiz content presentation that I don’t need or want. And I really hate the sometimes bizarre browser specific results of some fancy systems which yield 1 inch square comment boxes and the like. When I encounter something like that I just stop reading the blog.
So, my vote is stick with the old comment system. It works just fine.
Disclosure of prejudice: Maybe I’m just a cantankerous old fart, but if I were Gawd of the intarweb, I would ordain that every web page should be comfortably readable with Lynx. Any new comment system that meets that standard, I’ll read.
Sorry, but the only thing I have to contribute is another “flash issue”. Having so many flash objects on one page (i.e.: the main “www.theagitator.com” page) causes my flash interpreter to crash. So every time I hit the main site, my music stops playing.
I can’t comment on anything else, because now I can’t even get to the livepodium page to have it tell me that, in spite of the fact that I have flash installed, I don’t have flash installed. Because all of the flash links to the livepodium page die when I hit the main site.
No, nevermind, I can click on the individual stories, and get the flash link there. Where it tells me I don’t have flash installed.
Firefox 3, Fedora Core 9.
#25
I don’t really see any irony.
If you were actually paying for content, and I actually hoped to make a living from this blog, you might have a point. But you don’t. And I don’t. So my readers aren’t really customers. And I don’t really anticipate losing them to some criminal justice-themed competing blog because of the commenting system.
Also, traffic was actually up a bit last week.
Thinking this over – Fred, I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. I can give you 3 days in the coming week to rewrite this thing on a reasonable platform with plain HTML and JavaScript. It’ll be RoR backend with a PostgreSQL database, simply because a) it’ll work well and b) it’s what I use right now. We can use jQuery on the front end.
Within 3 days I can easily surpass what you already have written, and many or most of the outstanding issues (scroll wheel, auto links, etc.) will either go away or be very easily resolved. I’ll bill at standard rate, but we can work something out on that. It honestly won’t cost much.
My schedule is really tight right now, but I can shuffle stuff around to help you. Look on my web site for contact information (http://www.michaelchaney.com/).
“Remember Me On This Computer” checkbox in the login – doesn’t remember me. If I close my browser window, my info is lost and I have to retype the name/pass.
A designer should be consulted more sooner than later. The visual appearance of poster/info is confusing – when in the middle of nest threads, it’s difficult to tell which button goes with which name and so on. Posts are not easily discern in entirety due to this.
I’ve given some feedback in the past on the toolbar’s buttons (And lack of them) – nothing has improved, so i won’t waste time again typing suggestions that are going nowhere.
Why can’t i see the post while I’m commenting? Why is there a frame?
The + / – buttons on the posts don’t coordinate their efforts with the expand/hide frame checkbox in the interface. It would take too long to describe… just play with all of it for awhile, and you’ll see what i mean.
I’d complain some more about the whole Flash theory behind this, but it seems that it’s a dead issue insofar as improving the environment for readers to leave comments.
BTW, on this from the original post:
“Flash can be made to look like any UI.” :: Yes, it can. It can absolutely be made to LOOK like any other UI. But appearance and behavior are 2 separate issues; putting a Vista skin on a XP operating system doesn’t make your workstation behave as if it’s running Vista.
Hey, remember that solid year or so that I couldn’t use about half the freaking web (it seemed like) because I had nothing but a Linux system and Adobe refused to update Flash on that platform?
Oh yeah, you don’t, but I do.
Never. The hell. Again.
1) When you click on comments it opens in a new window. I don’t know how pop-up blockers work, and mine doesn’t seem to catch it, but I’d think there’s at least a potential of it getting blocked. Maybe it’s safe because you actively clicked on a link that directly created this new window?
2) Flash may be necessary for chat, but it’s probably still unnecessary for comments. I’d imagine a lot of people would never get to the comments with just that barrier to entry.
3) In this comments system you can directly link to a comment. So, in a comment thread with 10s of comments I could get a direct link to a specific one I’m interested in and e-mail it to friends, or reference it from another post, etc etc etc. Can’t do that with the new flash one.
4) The scroll bars don’t respond to page up, page down, or arrow keys.
5) The comments link doesn’t show up when viewing the site from a mobile device, or specifically my samsung omnia windows mobile phone, using Opera with mobile flash installed.
6) I can’t use a direct link to comments on the livepodium site on my mobile device.
7) The links on that site, with spaces in them, don’t paste well into e-mail programs, or probably really anywhere else, except the address bar in a web browser.
(Yes I actually do read this blog from my phone quite often.)
8) I’m not sure I’d like the idea of peole being able to edit comments. It would allow 1 person, a user at the site, to go back and destroy an entire conversation thread by changing what they’d originally said.
Please, please, please add OpenID support (http://openid.net/). Many people read a dozen or more blogs regularly and if each requires creating a separate account, it quickly becomes ridiculous having to manage all the different identities.
OpenID is an open source solution that allows users to use a single identity on various sites (e.g. in my case I could use my livejournal identity to log into the comments on your blog).
I’d like to chime in again. First, Michael’s pretty much spot on. He does the RoR approach, and my speciality is ASP.NET/Microsoft. One point of disagreeement I have with Michael is that the server licensing for Windows really isn’t that bad (look at web editions of Windows Server/SQL Server) and you’ll make up for it with TCO. Beefier editions will still make up their price via TCO but I don’t want to derail this into a defense of the Microsoft platform :) [I'll ignore any discussion of server platform choice as it tends to devolve into flamewars. I rarely post online for a reason. Any platform can work with the right engineers and Fred's gone with ASP.NET/Windows already]
From a business perspective I’d hesitate to throw away what Fred already has since he’s made the server platform choice. He also likely has a significant amount of back end logic and it’d be a bad idea to throw that away. If the user interface is the issue, that’s easily addressed.
As for where I agree with Michael… just about everything else.
The entire LivePodium application could be implemented using no Flash at all. BUT, the thing is, it isn’t necessarily an either/or proposition. The basic features such as commenting, user authentication, etc., should be done the standard approach with ASP.NET and AJAX (be it jQuery or ASP.NET’s) and Flash could potentially be used for other features. There might be some unusual design requirements or mitigating factors, but of course I’m offering my opinion here without a lot of specific knowledge of his system’s internals.
Fred, if you’d like to bounce around some ideas one on one with me, I’d be open to that. Free of charge (talk is cheap!). I think you have something interesting here and I’d very much like to see it improve and make users happy. Without users no application will go anywhere. Get my e-mail from Radley (I don’t want to publish it) or let me know you’d like to get in touch and I’ll find your information.
thanks and good luck
I concur. Flash is proprietary, a resource hog, unstable (prone to crashing), and above all, a known security risk. This is why the typical employer does not allow its use.
As well, even though I have flipped Flash on to look at comments here, it does not work for me. I get a message saying I need to install it, but it is installed and it does work fine on other sites I’ve tried that are serving Flash content.
I sent Fred Zimmerman, the Live Podium developer, a note about that, along with a referral to some people capable of implementing all this sans Flash, but I have not received a reply.
Michael Chaney’s offer sound like it’s less expensive but just as good. I hope Mr. Zimmerman will take advantage of it.
We aren’t your customers, but I hope we’re mostly people you want to have around.
There’s been a pretty strong consensus that LivePodium makes commenting less convenient and less accessible.
I don’t see what you gain by excluding people who can’t handle a high bandwidth flash commenting system.
I realize that you couldn’t do the work you do without being pretty thoroughly immune to social pressure, but I really wish you weren’t using that hardheadedness on your commenters.
I really like the site and enjoy the comments. Mostly I lurk, but sometimes I comment. The new comments link doesn’t show up in the standard browser on my new Blackberry Tour. I searched around with my pointer and the link doesn’t seem to be there. I read the blog quite often from my phone.
As for editing and the risk of an edit derailing a comment thread, at least one blog only lets you edit for 90 minutes after you post, and gives you a countdown for how much time you have left.
A luxurious approach would be to keep an edit history the way I think Wikipedia does, but that might be a little much.
It wouldn’t hurt to have comment previews– that would at least catch some of the typos and thinkos.
These days, some of the livelier sites offer a choice of comment views– oldest first, newest first, and threaded.
I’ve seen people complaining about LivePodium, and people saying “let’s allow the time to work the bugs out”, but is there anyone who thinks it’s an improvement? Anyone who’s enthusiastic about it?
Jeff, the TCO for a real open source solution is always significantly lower than a proprietary solution. Please don’t believe everything Microsoft tells you. I used to tell people the same thing 12+ years ago when I was doing Microsoft programming, and back then there actually was some amount of truth to it. But the TCO on an RoR app with a pgsql back end is negligibly more than the low upfront cost. If you’d like to discuss in email, feel free to. I’m curious about what you think the ongoing costs are that I’m missing in my business :)
As for throwing away what he’s got, well, yes, that’s what I’d recommend. There’s nothing particularly difficult about it, no real fancy logic, etc. I could tell you stories, but my favorite was when a customer dumped $80K of development, we started from scratch, and they saved a lot of money within a couple of months. It would have taken more money to finish what they had, written with Microsoft tools, than to rewrite it from scratch using good open source tools. In that case, we finished the entire site for around $15,000 with more features than they had originally planned. That cost, by the way, is less than they would have paid Microsoft for licenses had they implemented that solution.
So what I’m saying is that I could likely implement livepodium from scratch for less money than it would take to add the features that people are asking for to the current platform. If you take TCO into consideration, the gap is even larger, not smaller.
Given the nesting of comments, it might be useful to have a way of identifying “new” comments that have been posted since the viewer last read through them. That might not be possible given that new comments are pushed down immediately, but if someone is away from their computer for a while or browsing through the comments associated with a different topic, it’s not easy, when they return, to scroll back through the comments and differentiate between what they’ve already seen and what’s new.
This, isn’t a problem with linear posting where the user has to refresh the screen to bring in new comments and they can keep the comments for each topic open in a separate tab (which is what I did). I much prefer having control over when new comments are imported.
It would also be useful to highlight posts by the logged in user. That would allow him to at least quickly scan through all the posts to find replies to his comments without having to specifically scan for his user name. In fact, a simple keyboard command that jumps to his comments would be ideal.
In addition to the scroll wheel, keyboard based scrolling is also broken by Flash. As are text search, and browser based spellchecking.
I think Eric says it best in 21. Flash moves the comments off the web so I can’t interact with them the way that I expect to.
I’m not sure why anyone would want to chat *here*. If i want to chat with someone who posts here, I’ll drop a message and wait for them to contact me.
Also threading is just a pain. It’s not bad that the system allow it. I wish people didn’t use it.
I’ve stayed away from these discussions because I come here for the content and, even though I sometimes want to comment, it’s not that big of deal (this blog still has the same value to me even if there is no commenting). Plus, I’m pretty sure others have already covered the reasons I would give for not using the new system.
But this statement is factually incorrect…
I think Jeff was getting at something similar but to me, it seems like all the complaints have to do with the UI. And the UI layer can possibly/probably (I don’t know the architecture) be replaced without changing anything else. Tell Fred to take a look at this project (google for other examples).
My main issue with it is that the article I’m commenting on… isn’t on the page.
I can live with pretty much any other issue, but this one is the most annoying to me.
“Flash/Flash Media Server was chosen for the real time message protocol (RTMP) that allows real time communication and online presence.”
“Real time communication and online presence” is good? To me it just looks like comments are going to get to the flame war stage that much quicker.
As for my general feeling about LivePodium, I don’t believe it’s worth making constructive comments about. You’re basically asking us for spicing suggestions for a rubber pot roast.
If Fred is determined to stay with Flash, then it doesn’t matter what UI changes he makes. The system will still be fundamentally broken simply because it’s Flash based.
I don’t hate Flash. It’s quite useful for the graphics it was intended for. It’s much less useful when simulating text.
The only two complaints about the old system were that it lacked preview and edit. Well, so does the new system, and it packs on all sorts of new things to complain about.
My personal list of gripes:
1. Scroll still doesn’t work with MacOS 10.5 and either Firefox or NetNewsWire.
2. Putting the comments on a new page, instead on the same page as the article.
3. Text isn’t searchable.
4. Still no preview.
5. Still no edit.
6. Sloooooow and a resource hog.
Continuing #46, #49: I’ll wait for an HTML-based interface. Flash completely breaks keyboard-based web-browsing:
1. No keyboard scrolling (up/down arrow, page up/down, home, end etc).
2. No search (in Firefox I can type “/” to search for text, ‘ to search for hyperlinks).
3. No keyboard highlighting for copy/paste.
Continuing #21, flash-based content is invisible to google. It cannot be linked to, but also this means that outgoing links don’t influence the PageRank of the target pages.
In general, one of the best things about the web is that it is almost entirely based on text. Please help keep it that way. There exist HTML-based systems which include nested threads, comment moderation (and even meta-moderation), etc. Perhaps the best-known example is Slash.
I like the “Reply to feature”. I often like to respond to a point that someone made a while back even though the thread has drifted on.
I am a little ambivalent about logging in to comment, mainly for the reason that dsmallwood gives in #1, ie. I can’t use any password logons at work without triggering security, so I can’t comment. (Also, my work computer doesn’t support flash player.) OTOH, I think it will prevent some spoofing.
Considering the OFWDICT* moments I have after I’ve clicked submit, an EDIT feature will be most welcome.
*O Fuck Why Didn’t I Check That?
I’ll echo what most everyone else on this thread has already said. Flash for commenting makes no sense. It’s a poor use of the technology.
There are plenty of HTML commenting systems that do everything Live Podium is supposed to do and more, at least from a commenting perspective. For example, Disqus is pretty good and I don’t know why anyone would use this new system over that. For chat? Who comes to a blog to chat?
I have the same problem as described in comments 31 and 40: I can’t even get the comments to load so I can read them; instead I’m told I need to download Flashplayer, which I have.
And that’s if the link to the comments loads in the first place, which it does not always do. (About one day in three it does.)
This is with Firefox on dialup.
Another problem mentioned by others: the presence of the links to the Flash comments seems to disable the “open link in new tab” feature of Firefox, which makes it a pain to read what Radley links to.
To chime in on the RTMP/Flash bit, another alternative is to use an XMPP server (ejabberd or OpenFire) with xmpp4js. Libraries like jQuery make development dead simple, including the always nifty jQuery UI. JavaScript also tends to be a lot less of a resource hog.
1) It’s your site and you can do whatever you want.
2) Overall I’m ok with the system, but I’d echo Brad Fults in saying that Javascript can do quite a bit once you start using web 2.0/ajax technologies. As someone who designs/programs web apps for a living, we are not allowed to use Flash because some companies block installation of external browser plugins. And our app is a lot more complicated than that chat/comment application.
I think some people have the wrong impression why LivePodium is being used on the site. It’s not something that Radley’s trying to ram down our throats, whether we like it or not. It’s a system that he worked out a contract to allow the developer to test using us, his reader base. To have a meaningful test, it needs to get used, so a site with good comment traffic is needed.
The main thing I’m trying to say is that we don’t need to be getting grouchy at Radley for following through on what he said he’d do.
I haven’t used the new comment system and probably won’t because it requires me to give them my email with no promise/policy that it won’t be abused. I trust Radley Balko with my email, but not the owner of Live Podium – certainly not yet anyway:
The registration screen for livepodium auto-selects me to opt in to “Third party offers” and “news alerts” but provides no information who I would be getting these from (theagitator.com or live podium). And even if I deselect them there is no privacy policy on the LivePodium site and no guarantee that the large list of emails/names he is collecting from user won’t be sold or shared at a later time. I know from professional experience that such lists (particularly those that can claim to be opt-in and can be targeted to users interests, such as issues that this blog covers) are sold or rented for a nice sum.
Of course, no matter what comment system you use I’ll remain a daily reader of the site.
Highway, I have no problem with Radley’s contract.
Although, I have asked how much we’d have to rattle the tip jar to buy out the contract. ;-)
Still waiting for an answer, and it’s a serious question.
It’s a system that is poorly designed, half baked, and nowhere near ready for testing. No one faults Radley for wanting to try out a new comment system and make a few bucks on the side. The problem is that the new system is not only worse than the mediocre system we were using, it may be one of the very worst comment systems on the internet.
And to be quite honest, I don’t feel even the slightest twinge of guilt for pointing that out. We’re providing the feedback and putting up with the inconveniences, while Radley collects the check. Under that kind of arrangement, I don’t feel any obligation to silence my opinion of the obvious nature of the King’s new clothes in the name of politeness.
No mention here on this blog of American surrender to Taliban at foreward American post in Afghanistan.
Check!
Here’s the acid test. I had no idea there was a new commenting system. I tried to comment, and was mightily confused, to the point where I didn’t really feel like putting in the time figuring out what the heck was going on.
The end.
Adding new concepts and features is something that can and should be done as seamlessly as possible. Make sure you understand what the experience of the causal user is.
For me, feeling like you’re being taken to another site to comment totally breaks the intimacy of the blog as a venue for discussion. It feels like I’m being offloaded to yack elsewhere. At the very least, the new commenting system should be embedded into the existing site in such a way that you don’t experience it as a break or redirect.
Dave K, you don’t, but other comments on this thread sure do.
I also am not sure if I really see a benefit to the LivePodium system over the old comments system, but I also don’t think the people who have been complaining over the past week just that ‘this comment system sucks’ have been helpful at all.
Flash? What’s this about Flash? I don’t have Flash installed on my regular surfing browser and that is not going to change. It saves me a simply immeasurable amount of hassle. Very few web applications worth spending time with NEED Flash in order to accomplish their purposes; commenting on blog posts is certainly not one of the exceptions.
@ 61 / Highway:
I also don’t think the people who have been complaining over the past week just that ‘this comment system sucks’ have been helpful at all.
If you having a meal and it isn’t edible, is “this food sucks” helpful feedback? Perhaps it isn’t very descriptive feedback (which would aid improvement), but to someone trying to determine the average diner’s opinion – it’s very helpful.
I was involved in beta testing commercial software for 5 years. Believe me, “this sucks” is often given as feedback. Developers always get annoyed with such feedback, but occasionally I’ve also seen that developers forget their implied goal: To develop software that users will WANT to use.
Speaking generally, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen a developer get tunnel vision on their implementation, and from the start decide that “their way” IS the best way – and instead of starting over with a fresh (or more correct) approach, spend many weeks trying to make a broken system behave well enough that users will just stop complaining – or just stop giving feedback in frustration. The ultimate goal must be to deliver a product that users LIKE – not a product that people have just given up complaining about.
It’s comment/chrome ratio is extremely poor. This comment system has a more appropriate ratio. Heck, I’d move the +/- to the right of post’s top bar to allow a higher one *here*.
It’s a “no” issue for me when the ratio is even moderately bad.
No login and no passwords. Otherwise no comment.
get rid of the frame. when I click on comments, I want a scroll bar where I can go up and down thru all the comments. I do not want to scroll on a first scroll bar so that I can see the up or down down arrow (never both at the same time) so that I can then scroll up or down thru the whole comments thd.
You asked for it:
Just like everyone else said: Flash is an abominable choice for a commenting system. Sure, you can make it *look* like any given UI you like but you will never get it to *behave* like any given UI. Each of us uses our own platform for our own reasons and a crappy flash app will not emulate the dozens of possible combinations of browser/OS.
Furthermore, you note “mouse wheel scroll support” in your list of recent fixes. I’ll give you that the mousewheel now scrolls the window in probably the majority of cases based on the comments, but it sure does not behave in a way that I expect nor does it behave the same way that anything else on my given platform does. Each scroll moves the screen about half a line instead of the default of 3 that I am used to.
Keyboard navigation is broken across the board. Clicking on the scrollbar does not do anything. The system does not work at all for a variety of reasons in a lot of work environments including my own. Flash is encapsulated from the rest of the browser so any normal web behavior is broken including linking preferences both into and out of the flash app. It is just a lousy choice all the way around. It is simply the wrong tool for the job.
I’ve read hundreds of comments about the system and I cannot recall ONE SINGLE POSITIVE comment. The most ringing endorsement you’ll find is “I’m ok with the system.”
Given that you’ve said an HTML version is on your future features list, some or all of the above may become moot points. My primary suggestion would be to put that the HTML version at the *top* of your list and abandon flash altogether. I can only hope that the poor decision making that led to the choice of using flash doesn’t infect the HTML version.
Other suggestions independent of the flash issues:
Let us choose between nested comments and flat comments sorted by date. Some people like one, some people like the other, and offering the choice is trivial.
Get rid of the frame. I have a big monitor for a reason.
If you have to use new windows for this project, give them unique names. I like the ability to have comments open from several different posts at once. (And while you’re at it, make the “link” to comments something OTHER THAN FLASH so that I can right-click on it or use a mouse gesture on it, or for that matter perform any standard web or browser-specific action on it.
Radley — I’ll be “subscribing” to the tip jar. This site is certainly worth the equivalent of a magazine a month and I encourage others to do the same.
Sorry if this has been covered, but because some of us might prefer not to have our online/offline status publicized, an option to opt in/out of that feature would be welcome. In fact, it might determine whether we post at all.
It would be great if there was an email we could send bug reports to.
Thanks
Flash is unusable in today’s environment period. On my fully updated mac the lastest flash hangs all browsers. It’s unusable, it slows browsing dramatically anyway. Sorry it’s not where you want to be imo…
I still have no problem with you doing what you need to do however. Just expect many less new commenters as well as losing some old ones.
I said this over at http://www.theagitator.com/2009/10/08/morning-links-255/#comment-369946 but I’ll repeat a lot of it here just to make sure it is in the right place.
The comments are why I keep visiting this site. The move to LP has drastically changed an enjoyable experience to a quite negative one.
I agree with most of the criticism of LP.
The only feature of LivePodium that I like is the threading of comments. Now I don’t have to read every comment to follow a discussion on one narrow topic. I can just read the threads that look interesting to me.
However this one improvement does not make up for all the problems with LP.
I’ll start with the fact that LP doesn’t allow you to read the article and write a comment at the same time. I often will have to refer back to the article to make sure I get my facts correct. With the old system I could just scroll up. With LP I have to open a new window or tab (something I can’t do with a key stroke b/c of flash catching them), then navigate back to theagitator.com and find the post I’m commenting on. By that point I’ve decided I’ve spent too much time on this site and move on to another site.
Related to this is the fact that LP is a different site than theagitator.com. Comments should not be off on another site. As someone above mentioned it is like comments are trying to be swept under the rug.
The next problem is the LP clips longer comments. While it would help if you could scroll the individual comment, that really seems unnecessary as the comment really should be entirely visible.
Also as mentioned above the graphic design and layout of LP needs some serious help. It needs to be as clean and simple as the old system.
However for me all of above issue pale in comparison to the lace of a spellchecker. Firefox’s spellchecker does not work with LP due to flash. LP does not have its own internal spellchecker. So the only way to spellcheck one’s comments is to open up OpenOffice and (since you can’t copy from or paste to flash) carefully type your comment into OO, run spellcheck and then even more carefully retype the comment into LP. This may be less of a problem for folks who can actually spell.
Finally don’t believe the hype about needing flash and RTMP. As others have pointed out there are very good alternatives out there. Flash is great for delivering video content. It is ok for a chat client. It great for web games. It is not so great for a comment system. If you’re absolutely wedded to the real time updating, look at something AJAX based.
Flash seems to be the common means of presenting animated advertising. Animated advertising is the crap that’s constantly vying for your attention off to the sides of the frame, in your peripheral vision, with its constant hyperactive wiggling, as if it were a swarm of ADHD insects dancing frantically around the boundaries of your monitor. It’s the annoying spam that forces itself into your consciousness, invading your computer without even having to go through email. It’s just one more way for unstoppable kudzu of junk marketing to interrupt your private life, pry open your brain, and force feed a sales pitch into the raw nerve endings of your brain. Even as you sit there, feeling violated and powerless, additional adds are lining up patiently waiting their turn.
But, we have a weapon against Flash. We have Flash blockers, I have one. When I turn it on, suddenly most advertising disappears and I’m left with clean, static text. Flash advertising is like trying to listen to Beethoven with some guy operating a jack hammer right outside your window. When it stops, you actually feel the flood of endorphins elevating your mood as your thoughts once again become your own. Flash blockers turn off the jack hammer of flash advertising.
Why would anyone want to encode content in Flash knowing that Flash blockers are becoming increasingly popular as a means of filtering out unwanted content? (I mean aside from using Flash as a means to get Flash advertising past people’s Flash blockers, of course)
You can provide a fake email address.
I also agree that comment threading is generally undesirable. The times when you want comment threading are when you’re browsing an old post, looking at comments made a while ago with no more being added, and when there’s hundreds of comments on the page to manage, and you specifically don’t want to follow all of them. Allowing it to toggle is probably the best solution.
I have nothing more to add on the flash vs whatever else platform. Hopefully when the html alternative is implemented, it will be seen by all parties that it’s a better fundamental way to go.
“couldn’t use the comment system at work. it trip my security system.”
Ditto that guy and also even if it didn’t trip security I don’t and cannot install flash on the work PC.
I used to be able to connect through port 80 at work. Now, nothing works.
First, I’d like to qualify this by saying that no matter the commenting system, I will not stop visiting The Agitator. It’s the first site in my list of blogs that I visit daily, and I don’t see the quality of the content changing because of a commenting system. Content is King but commenting is (and should be) fun, but it is definitely optional for me. That said…
The Flash sucks. No way around it and no better way to say it. It just sucks.
The framing & nesting is a pain in the butt. I rarely even read comments anymore because of the scrolling & nesting.
Logging in is another feature that only wastes my time and provides no benefit to the end user. I don’t mind sharing my email address with you, Radley. But sending me off to another site and then asking me to share my info is irritating.
‘Online status’ bothers me. This along with the ‘logging in’ complaint makes me sound paranoid, but I don’t like it. I would like a way to opt out.
I rarely comment so these changes don’t affect me much, but I do enjoy reading the comments made by others so I’d have to say the Flash and the scrolling are the most bothersome to me.
Good luck with the new system, Radley. I’m a web designer by trade so I know how frustrating changes can be for the site owner and the users. You’ll never please everyone.
Secondary nesting is allotted a fixed space of 2 lines on the screen and can’t be expanded. It makes replies to replies unreadable if the second reply is more than 2 lines.
Mouse scrolling does work if the second reply is longer, but this is not possible if you aren’t using scrolling, or if you are viewing in a browser where scrolling is bugged for some people.
Log in is still not persistent.
I think the process of turning your readers into a software QA sweatshop is destructive. While you maintain that you give the readers free content and that we should be grateful, I think where this argument fails is that you maintain we give nothing back.
The simple number of pageviews that we give you increases the value of your blog and the amount of revenue you get when we click through any ads you post.
I’ll continue to be constructive in my criticisms of the new comment system because I know that you’ll get paid for our work and I like contributing to a good cause but I think you are a bit hard on those who have been complaining non stop. This comment system was a far cry from what one would expect from a first user beta. Any developer worth their salt should have seen 90% of the flaws in their system and corrected them before ever letting a live user see the work. It’s piss poor.
Well, the error I am now getting is this: Detailed Error: NetConnection.Connect.Failed : undefined
So, its been nice reading comments up until this experiment. I will catch up when I get to the house ;)
bug report:
I’m looking at the Joe Arpaio Has Asked Him To Send a Resume post at the post by Andrew S a Mon Oct 12 2009 04:45:02 PM.
I can’t see the last line of text – “can still think of it as self defense.” – unless I select the text in the post and drag my mouse down. When I de-select the text, the last line disappears.
I’m using Chrome on a PC.
Fred Zimmerman <fzimm@hotmail.com>
I don’t care for the typical contact-me-via-some-little-box on my web site, which he does provide. They’re too restrictive…
This is the first time I had even looked at the comments.
1. To have the comments embedded into your site. I dont want to go to another site to read the comments.
2. Mouse wheel doesnt work on Mac Safari. That’s really a must
3. The UI needs work. The UI really makes it hard to read, follow comments.
4. Cant do a firefox/safari search for text.
My idea: take the best from disqus and reddit comments, and do that. Get a designer to create a killer UI. And really the flash is just killing your accessibility and browser functionality. Adobe AIR maybe? now that could be cool.
I note that the average number of comments on threads where LP is used has fallen ‘way off. The astute observer will learn from this.
Long comments don’t appear to display properly.
Look at the post dated Tue Oct 13 8:17 am on this link:
http://www.livepodium.com/LivePodium.aspx?Title=More on the Nobel&Byline=Radley Balko&Domain=The Agitator&PostID=14837
Either the first or the last line of the post is cut off. If you scroll by dragging the scrollbar the visible contents remain the same. If you scroll using the mouse wheel you can see the missing line but only at the expense of the other end of the post.
Maybe, after four month test period, Radley will split that thousand bucks with the few of us remaining. Then, as kind of an internet based celebration, we can each go out for a night of steak, wine, and women. Then, the very first post back on the old comment system could be where we all share our horror stories about the night’s events.
Geez, with my great ideas for promoting political camaraderie I’m surprised no one has snapped me up to manage their campaign or run their party organizing efforts. I mean, what is politics all about if not food, alcohol, and sex?
Sorry Dave, a split of $1000 will get little steak, less wine, and the women, well, you get what you pay for..
I’m a big fan of equality for women. I was planning on the women paying their own way.
It doesn’t work at all in my MyTouch G2 Android phone
I just can’t get it to work at all while I’m at work using Firefox.
A little late because I don’t comment much. Yet another “I can’t comment from work”. I could under the old system (although for some reason I wasn’t pre-moderated like from my home IP address.)
Not happy about the opt-out and all the fanciness, and the insistence on opening in a new window.
I haven’t really been able to even look at the comment system because it won’t run at all at work. Since my blog reading is usually done at lunch, since that’s the only stretch of peach I get most days, that has resulted in me not seeing a single comment on this site since you first started using this new system. I realize that you’ve turned it off here and there. But that’s not something you can see in Google Reader, so I had basically written the entire thing off.
Now that I’ve finally tried it at home, I saw that it requires me to register. I really have no interest in having yet another login and password to remember, even if the comment system did function on my work computer.
Finally, it’s not even embedded? It’s really necessary to open a new window for the comment system to work? Oh yeah, that will make it so much easier to remember what post those comments are connected to than when they were just at the bottom of the post.
Honestly, everything about this thing seems more like some masturbatory programming session (i.e. “wouldn’t it be cool to add this in”) than an attempt to make this an improvement. However, the effect is that it keeps me reading everything in Google Reader. Since I can’t read comments, I don’t come to your page, and then never have a reason to even see the ads or the amazon links on your page.
I posted (far) above about some easy fixes for livepodium. After thinking it over and trying to use the site, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is unnecessary and complicated junk. Even with all of the fixes mentioned in this thread, it would basically just go toward approximating the pre-livepodium status quo. So just ditch it completely. It’s annoying and contributes zippo.