PUBLIC MARKS with tags webdesign & comments

Defuse is a new method for navigating and participating in online discussions. Previous designs for online discussion were successful under the assumption that participation would be limited to tens or at most hundreds of participants. Emergent social conventions have been able to smooth over media as they scale, but ultimately they are limited by the design of a medium itself. Defuse seeks to continue scaling online discussions by adding social, structural, and historical context throughout the interface, and by widening the expressivity of a message to match the user's intention. It does so using a combination of natural language processing, machine learning, visualization, data portraiture, social network analysis, and medium design.

On the July 9th 2009 we launched a complete redesign of Carsonified and the Think Vitamin blog. I thought it’d be fun to tell you the story of how the new site design evolved and came to life. It was an interesting journey.

Baekdal.com now features a completely redesigned commenting system that tabs into the power of social networks. Instead of manually typing in your name, you simply press a button. How amazing is that...

We just rolled out a new comments system today at Digg. Redesigning one of the busiest and most vibrant comments areas on the web is pretty intimidating. Every day quite a few thousands of people participate in the comments and many more read the comments even if they're not participating. Despite its shortcomings, many people are familiar with the current system and forcing people to adapt to an altered version isn't something I took lightly.

Beginning today, we are rolling out a completely rewritten comment system. Some users may notice the changes immediately, and others may notice the new stuff several days later. In other words, this is a rolling release, and since it may contain some bugs, we'd rather only a subsection of the Newsvine population be exposed to it at this time.

These are just different ways of displaying what can be a rather long list of comments.

By far the most complex portion of the comments system was how dynamic it was going to be. Threads would be zipping in and out, we’d be creating 90% of the HTML dynamically in the DOM from JSON, posting and editing over AJAX, etc. It was during design that Micah and I also plotted to remove script.aculo.us and replace it with the smaller jQuery library. The entire comment system is, in fact, a series of jQuery plugins.

Digg has added a new comment system which, in an apparent effort to fight "comment abuse", hides replies automatically. Comments can be expanded either through clicking on 'View Replies' or using the 'Expand Tree' button in 'Comment Display Options'. The Digg Up and Digg Down buttons also have new icons.

Hola! We’re excited to launch the new Comments system – we’ve listened to your requests and feedback and have incorporated many of your suggestions. Some highlights include:

After months of work behind the scenes, vague promises up front, and half-assed hacks, today we are very excited to take the wraps off exciting new stuff for Lifehacker commenters. In order to make having conversations with your fellow readers here easier, we've just rolled out a major revamp to our site commenting system. Fresh out of the oven, our all-new "threaded comments" system organizes comment replies more logically and makes discussing the post at hand—and other users' reactions to it—easier to do and digest. Hit up any post with comments to start tinkering with the new system yourself, or read on to get the full rundown of what's changed and why.

I’ve made another improvement to the comments system, and this time I think it’s pretty innovative (well, I think the last one was as well, but I do like this one). This only works 100% correctly in Mozilla, and I’m not sure why. IE and Opera get 90% of the way there, and that’ll do until I figure out what the problem is. Anyway, on to the idea…

I was thinking about alternative ways to block comment spam the other day and it occurred to me that there’s potentially a simpler solution than the Invisible Captcha approach I wrote about.