[CentOS-docs] proposed changes option

Fri Apr 3 17:15:31 UTC 2009
Dag Wieers <dag at centos.org>

On Fri, 3 Apr 2009, Marcus Moeller wrote:

> Good Evening,
>
>> Ralph Angenendt wrote:
>>> I still have a small problem with the comment plugin I have found quite some
>>> time ago - you can only have one "comment box" per page. Second problem is
>>> that it is open to everyone (well, you need a login, but no Edit Access), so
>>> we need many people having an eye on comments to weed out spammers.
>>
>> Considering most of the content here is from static files, I wonder how
>> much work it would be to plugin some other comment system and have the
>> content included in the page itself. I'm happy to hack together
>> something like this with you if you fancy it?
>
> Comments may be an opportunity, but I think not the best. At least in
> wikipedia, comments are sometimes used to post suggestions (or spam),
> but often ignored by the original author.
>
> I would prefer to have a direct link on each page to the original
> author and the last editor (besides the page history) to get in
> contact with him/her. Also the revision number would make sense for
> translations, as mentioned some time ago.

I think having comments is better than a link to the original and last 
author mostly because sometimes people want to report some small 
improvement, but if the overhead of doing the report is too big (opening 
an email application, copying the address, entering a subject, write the 
comment) than we may loose out on the feedback.

Also a comment system can be moderated by a group of people, while private 
email/messages may get lost.

For those reasons I like a comment system more (eg. I always loved the 
comments in the PHP annotated manual which was the first such comment 
system I had seen for documentation).

We just have to make sure that comments are in some way moderated. Or only 
visible to people that are logged on, or something like that. We should 
avoid at all cost that a spam message becomes available to
non-authenticated users even for a short period (because it would be a 
motivation to spam).

-- 
--   dag wieers,  dag at centos.org,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]