The Resurgent
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daveburton
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Site issues/suggestions:

First, I want to thank you for not using Facebook for your commenting system, since Facebook censors conservatives.

I also want to thank you for not using Disqus, which is better than Facebook, but which blocks printing/saving of article comments.

However, the system that you're using has a lot of usability problems:

  1. The formatting is unconventional, and undocumented. When composing a comment there's no help/advice about how to do so.

(This should be very easy to fix!)

  1. Embedded HTML (such as <b>...</b>) does not work at all.
  1. Bare hyperlinks which begin with http or https are handled very strangely. Sometimes they turn into clickable hyperlink URLs, as expected. Sometimes they turn into "embeds," which are snippets from the linked page. Sometimes the original URL is still visible, but sometimes it disappears, as well. There's no obvious pattern to the behavior.
  1. There's no "preview" or "edit/fix" option, to help commenters get it right. All we can do is try things and see how they come out.
  1. When it decides to create an "embed" from a link, there's a little "edit pencil" which we can click to turn each embed on or off. That's nice, except that if we turn it off then the original link is gone, too. There's no option to just show the link, as typed: it's the embed, or nothing.
  1. There's no "permalink" which links to the comment.

Please fix these issues!

Comments
No. 1-9
cynicalnerd
cynicalnerd

@daveburton Just found a new quirk. Encapsulating something in asterisks will italicize it.

cynicalnerd
cynicalnerd

I can understand wanting to move away from Disqus for a number of reasons (wpDiscuz is good alternative for WordPress-based sites) but this comment system is nutty enough (and worse I can find any official documentation for it, thanks for the effort @daveburton) that barring shorter comments, I'm going to start writing the comments in Libreoffice, post a placeholder comment on the article page, click the edit button, copy and paste in the box and make sure that the formatting isn't broken before submitting the true comment.

Onlylivingboy
Onlylivingboy

Yeah. This layout is awkward and confusing. I'm sure there are good reasons not to use disqus, but from a user perspective, Disqus has a lot to recommend it.

AJ_Liberty
AJ_Liberty

Excellent suggestions...and thanks for letting me know how to do paragraphs....the double-post seems like an awkward way to do it...if that was the intent of the system

daveburton
daveburton

This is also a separate comment.

Sometimes there's a "..." link which allows editing a comment. But it is strangely placed, and sometimes it's covered up by the text. (I'm using Chrome.) I'm going to attempt to post an annotated screenshot.

Well, uploading the picture (screenshot) didn't seem to work, so I put it on my web server here:

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