Designing better comments

Note Facebook has converged on the same dialog structure that we have going now in td … which is a thought followed sequentially by trains by posting time,  which trains are themselves sequences of comments decending by time. 

G+ seems to have only one train, but designates who a comment is responded to.

Twitter might have a different model.

Reddit and Slashdot and W3C forums have nested threading giving each comment a url within the thread even with the ability to embed a deep nest at another website.

I think that the facebook model and the one we have converged on here is simple yet quite adequate.  There are plenty of mechanisms to diverge in dialogue from and nest a conversation by references to other dialogues outside of a specific train of thought. 

However our current method of constructing trains by including all of the prior comments within the content or the last comment creates more problems than it solves. 

Instead we can create the structure we have now, and the same one used by facebook,  by adding a train number to the comment record.  The train then can be constructed by a simple SQL query, with no need to mark delete the prior comments within the train.   By doing so we will essentially design out the possibility of a fork,  allow for editing (or deleting) of prior comments, allow for rights to be controlled by each comment rather than the last person to comment on a thread.   In short it will provide easy solutions for almost all of the problems we have been having with comments.

Trains having an identity will also facilitate the need to move them to other thoughts.


to be continued …  focused comments encouraged … [notify nathan, mark]

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