Comment feeds

[lamashtar]

Title:
Comment feeds

Area:
comments

Summary:
A comment feed like that used on blogs, so you can receive all the comments made to a community without having to track all the individual posts and clog your email.

Description:
Many blogs now offer comment feeds, in addition to entry feeds. Feed readers offer quick ways of zooming through content to see what you might be interested in. One of the drawbacks to the journal thread system is that if you are not the original poster you won't receive all the comments on a post. People tend to visit the post a few times and then assume the conversation has died and move on. You lose out on participating in conversation you might've been interested in.

With comment feeds, you immediately know when someone has commented on an old post. You can respond and engage them. You can also do searches if you're looking for a specific conversation in the feed, which can be useful for mods. Using this system for blogs has saved me a lot of surfing loading time and I can swiftly determine whether or not a post or comment is worth participating in.

While tracking a post does similar things for specific posts or comments of interest, it requires prognosticating that an interesting conversation will develop and it sends the notification straight to your email box, often filling it up with nonsense you have to open and check each individually. A possible answer is to allow the tracking feature to be set up for feeds, which would allow almost all the features of regular comment feeds, though it would not allow you to know if someone commented on very old posts if the journal you're following has a large archive.

Poll #2724 Comment feeds

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 36

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
12 (33.3%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
3 (8.3%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
5 (13.9%)

(I have no opinion)
16 (44.4%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[cesy]

If we do this, it would offer similar functionality as allowing people other than the community admin to subscribe to all comments in a community, which was a recent suggestion of mine.

You can achieve some of this by turning on the Active Entries module in the community style - that shows which posts have had comments recently.

[yvi]

You can achieve some of this by turning on the Active Entries module in the community style - that shows which posts have had comments recently.

Only works for paid communities.

[feathertail]

There's a module like that? Oh hey, cool. That's pretty close to another idea I had.

[badficwriter]

I checked, didn't see an Active Entries module in the style page..

[jadelennox]

I would support this for paid communities only. It seems like a nice version of the kind of feature to ask people to pay for.

[susanreads]

Good idea! *changes vote*