Make comment count & link for crossposted entries reciprocal

[cimorene]

Title:
Make comment count & link for crossposted entries reciprocal

Area:
interoperability, entries

Summary:
Place a link (with comment count) at the bottom of the original DW entry to its crossposted mirror.

Description:
Right now we have the option to include a link back to the original DW entry on crossposted versions of it, displaying the number of comments at the original entry. Any readers of the mirror journal will know if they are missing any discussion at DW, but DW readers don't currently know if they are missing part of the discussion at the mirror location.

I'd like to be able to generate a copy of that notice/comment count that would include the address of the cross-posted entry and a comment count for it, and place it on the original DW version of the entry so that both copies would link to each other.

Drawbacks:

If the same entry is crossposted to more than 1 other site, the number of links could eventually start to become unwieldy.

It would require another step after completed crossposting to modify the original entry on DW with the link.

Poll #1575 Make comment count & link for crossposted entries reciprocal

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 46

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
28 (60.9%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
6 (13.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
5 (10.9%)

(I have no opinion)
7 (15.2%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[kaigou]

I'm a little confused. Could you post examples of what you mean -- what text I'd see on the original/DW post, and what I'd see on the xposted post? Just some kind of general text, because I'm not sure what's changing where, from your description.

[sofiaviolet]

Possibly this is a bad explanation - I am tired - but I think what cimorene is suggesting is this:

At the bottom of my entries-crossposted-to-lj, there are some links and a comment count for the original post on Dreamwidth (the crosspost footer). Here's an example - This entry was originally... blah blah blah

For comparison, this is the original DW post. See how it lacks the crosspost footer?

So add a crosspost footer to the DW post which links to the LJ post and gives the comment count on the LJ post.

I don't know where we would get the comment count images, though. LJ and its clones don't generate those, as far as I know.

[existence]

And would it be possibly without help on their end, I wonder? Still, that would be a very nifty thing if it was feasible.

[zarhooie]

The functionality is already in the system, I think. It's just a matter of wrangling it to do what it's supposed to do.

[cesy]

Adding an option along these lines would be very nifty if it was feasible.

[azurelunatic]

LiveJournal doesn't as yet provide a comment count, but otherwise so very much yes!

[matgb]

Do you want someone to put that into the Suggestions queue for you? Or is it something they're working on anyway? It would definitely be good as something to include in full feeds for RSS (the default) and similar, encourages more eyeballs to come read, which helps their ad revenue.

[azurelunatic]

I haven't seen it in the volunteer-accessible side of things they're working on, so someone popping it into the queue would be much appreciated. (I'd put more things in myself, but as a maintainer I am forced to jump the queue, which causes entry-threading issues, and I hate sockpuppeting.)

[matgb]

Done, note sure I've worded it clearly, but...

[azurelunatic]

Works for me! http://community.livejournal.com/suggestions/972421.html

[the_shoshanna]

I would want per-site control over this, not just all or nothing. Partly because *cough* I like to use the crosspost footer to drive traffic to Dreamwidth.

[aedifica]

+1 on control.

[copracat]

Yes, agree on per-site control, but otherwise this function is wanted very much by me.

[ratcreature]

I dislike the comment count images. They do not have a size, so I see image placeholders. I don't think that has been fixed yet.

[afuna]

Patch has been submitted; should go out within the next couple of codepushes. (So not image placeholders for long *g*)

[denise]

There's a bug open for it, but it's a hard problem, because all the different comment numbers have different width images, so we'd have to edit the entry on $othersite every time it went from 9->10 comments, 99->100, etc etc.

We have a solution almost, it's just not perfect.

[ratcreature]

At the moment I don't care that much, because I have everyone who consistently crossposts on my dw reading list, so I only see them on LJ from whose who don't always crosspost, but if this reverse thing was implemented I'd see them all the time.

[gusl]

why is it implemented as an image at all? it would be better to do transclusion of the number as plain text.

[matgb]

OK, a word I don't know. *googles*

Wikipedia says:

At present[update], transclusion in HTML is somewhat limited by lack of standards support in web browsers. Although all graphical browsers can transclude an image, including a document is a bit more difficult. There are currently two methods of achieving this result:

It's a dynamic bit of information that changes quickly. It needs to be esported in a format that's completely readable by all browsers in pure HTML so that it shows up on whatever other site it ends up on.

If that's possible, great, but I know of no standards compliant way of doing it without using an image.

[gusl]

I want to bitch at the HTML standard. Why support transclusion of images but not text?!

Another idea is to do server-side transclusion, which would mean that the blog HTML gets served after transcluding the text... but this might be too much to ask for.

I'm curious about the Ajax solution mentioned on the Wikipedia article.

[matgb]

For the first, simple answer. I can't type an image, so they had to figure out a way of including them, if you saying "include this image on my server" making that so it's "include this image on any server" is easy.

But there's no pressing need to grab text from elsewhere, as you're already creating text here. Thus images were put in ages back (probably for porn), but text, being already there, wasn't.

That we now have many uses for it above and beyond what the initial idea was, makes it regrettable, but there're people working on solutions somewhere, probably, and it's way beyond my ken.

[denise]

The problem with all of that is that LJ-based sites (which is where most of the crossposting is going) doesn't permit entries to contain AJAX, iframes, or the object tag, for safety and security reasons, which means that none of the methods work. :(

[kerravonsen]

Yesssss.
I don't particularly care about comment count, but I really do want a link to my LJ post from my Dreamwidth post.
But if it were possible I'd like a bit more control over what appears, because I crosspost to DW, LJ and IJ, but the IJ is just for backup purposes, so I don't want it to appear as a crosspost-link on DW.

[magycmyste]

+1