Think Before You Speak
Sam Ruby is conducting a test to see how people feel about being required to preview their blog comments prior to posting them. Since Sam’s test system seems to be only allowing preview, and not post, I’ll comment here.
I prefer to see my comments in preview before I post… I am a notoriously poor typist, and often think faster than I type. I usually end up tweaking posts on my blog two or three times immediately after posting, because I’ve never gotten around to adding preview to my web-based posting system.
Am I less likely to be spontaneous? I doubt it. I didn’t have to take time out to register; I can start typing as soon as I read your post (or another comment). The only difference is, I’m asked to read my own work before others do. This might make me reconsider something I typed, but probably only if it was prone to moderation anyway. Will it help with comment spam? Can’t hurt.
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Infinite preview fixed
Sam appears to have fixed the infinite preview problem.
I wouldn’t mind
I always preview when I have the choice, and even then I leave several mistakes in my comments. Because that’s how I am. Of course, some people might be more diligent at reading what they write before they push a button. And people who don’t use the “Preview” button when they have the choice, probably won’t bother to read what they’ve written even when forced to preview. So my favorite is having the choice to preview or to just post directly.
Ruby seems more intent on stopping spam than stopping typeos. Forcing a preview would probably break the current comment-spam scripts. But as soon as everybody started forcing previews, the scripts would be updated, of course. Spammers are sneaky like that.
Does that button down there give me a preview, or does it just post? We’ll find out…
It just posts…
Great, not only don’t you have a preview feature on your blog, Mr. Clark, but apparently I was supposed to use HTML to markup my comment. Live and learn.
No Previews…
Chris,
Good points. In fact, my comments system is basically the stock writeback plugin for Blosxom. I only added timestamps last night.
Ideally, I’d like to support wiki-style markup in the comments instead of html… I author my posts using the wikieditish plugin which allows me to use such markup, but comments aren’t handled. And I really should have preview. Guess it’s time to work on that.
Look at that….
HTML not supported either. It’s definately time to fix up comments around here. Stay tuned….
Keyword Based Comment Filtering
I’ve done some work “porting” the MT-Blacklist concepts over to blosxom. It’s been very effective in nearly eliminating comment spam. I’ve got some tools that can be used to cleanup blosxom writeback comment files that remove the spam and leave the remaining comments. Just thought you might care…