[Site Feedback] Guest Comments Window

[Ryechu]

This is more a general suggestion than anything.

I'm finding that the guest comments window located above the Torrent download is generally useless, and contains no real useful information. Typically it devolves into "Why does {x} not work." only to discover that below the torrent the error and how to fix it is spelled out, or (my current favorite) "i am farted." Additionally, the positive reviews that can sometimes be found in those windows is either moved down or deleted or what have you, by comments that are hundreds of times less useful.

I believe it would be better for the image of the site to remove this window and replace it with either moderated blog-style responses, or nothing at all. This way useful feedback can be kept and the useless information can simply be pitched. I'm sure a few of the mods would be willing to add this to a quick check (a feature for those with Admin to see what has been posted recently would be useful, should this suggestion be implemented), and it would certainly clean up the atmosphere.

If there's a legitimate reason to keep them, I sure can't see it under all of the reasons we shouldn't have them in the way they are currently being used.

/discuss

[Zakamutt]

This was discussed in IRC fairly long a while ago. In the end, the mods don't want to take the potentially heavy load that comes from moderating comments; I imagine now they can just say "edit out the stupid shit then".

Eventually naynay will prolly get at least the user reviews section up, and troubleshooting faqs are curently in progress on the forums; I guess they'll be linked to the vn dl pages eventually.

Also anon comments like these have an extremely low barrier to entry, which is useful to decrease participation inequality -- it's too bad it will fill up with shit with some frequency.

[Eurobeatz]

I think that stupid comments and trolling are kind of unavoidable with comments, so blog-style responses wouldn't really fix the problem unless people were willing to moderate the comments. But I do agree that a lot of the comments in the window are dumb.

[Nayleen]

Throwing in my feedback to your request from a developer point-of-view:

As Zakamutt already said, we had this discussion about 2 weeks back regarding guest comments and how they could be made better. Blog-style comments came up, so did "hurr just implement Disqus" - both are not ideal solutions as the way guest comments work right now is the way it's intended to be - they're volatile and for the most part self-moderated (meaning other users can simply edit unwanted/stupid stuff).

At least we are able to moderate guest comments properly now, reverting values and blocking infringing users from posting further guest comments. I do this myself about twice per day, but I've seen guest comments moderated by others as well today - so we're slowly getting there.

User Reviews are next on my agenda, but I won't start working on them until the guest comments work a bit better by themselves. Expect them to be a lot cleaner by the end of the week.