More on the super awesome commenting system

As Berin noted in the last post, we have installed Disqus on the TLF as our new commenting system. There are a couple of things I’d like to highlight about the new system.

First, I want to underscore what Berin said: claim your comments! Why is this so important? First, this lets you and other users see a page with every other comment you’ve posted on the TLF. Second, people can choose to “follow” your comments and be notified when you post something. Finally, over at the TLF community page on Disqus there’s a “Top Commenters” leaderboard, and I know you want to be at the top. So don’t start from zero, claim all your existing comments.

Next I want to draw your attention to the two little arrows to the left of commenters’ avatars (photos). Most folks know what this means, but I’ll explain anyway for those who may not. This lets you vote on each comment to let the system know whether the comment is especially smart and interesting or boneheaded and unhelpful. Good comments (up arrow) move up to the top of the thread, and comments that receive negative votes (down arrow) move toward the bottom and eventually disappear if they get enough downgrades. If you’d like to sort comments by the order they were posted, and not by votes, you can click the “Options” button below and choose your sorting preference.

Last, I want to just mention a couple other cool features. If you post a comment and someone posts a reply to you, you’ll get an email notifying you of the fact. Pretty cool, but it gets better. To post a comment in reply to that reply you don’t have to visit the blog, you can just hit “reply” and write an email in response. Your email will get posted to the TLF blog as a reply comment. Also, Disqus makes a bunch of RSS feeds available. There’s a feed for all TLF comments, feeds for comments posted to a specific blog post, feeds for specific commenters, etc.

Anyhow, hope you folks like it. Now go claim your comments!

Comments Posted in: Miscellaneous