The Things You Readers Would Do For An Edit Button: COTD

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Hey Autopians! This little corner of the internet is nearing a year old. In that time, this site-with your help-has reached some incredible milestones. Hundreds of you are supporting members and our readers seem to be eating up stories like we put some addictive chemical into your computers and puff them out every time you land on our page. Seriously, thank you so very much for being the awesome readers that you are. Of course, we still have a lot of work to do.

Some of you have noticed that our commenting system is still lacking in features and some of you have noticed that your comments aren’t getting through. I’ll get to notifications, images, and an edit button in a second. At first, I just want to address what’s going on when you submit a comment and you get a confusing pop-up that it’s being moderated.

As many of you know, spambots love this place. Well, actually, some of the bots don’t appear to be bots, but real people just copy and pasting their junk into comments. I’m not sure if that’s impressive or sad. In the process of ridding our site of these posters, we’ve figured out that our content filtering system is imperfect. If we crank it up high enough that basically no bot goes through, a lot of legitimate, harmless comments get caught up in the crossfire. But if we turn it down super low, the floodgates remain open. So, we’re experimenting with ways to squash the spammers while not putting actual readers into purgatory. And it’s not just you, sometimes I will comment on something and our spam killer gets mad at me.

So, if your comment ends up in the holding tank, don’t fret. We’re likely not mad at you and we will publish your comment when we find it.

Now, about the commenting system itself. We see your frustration. I mean, today’s comment of the day is this banger from v10omous:

Cotd Edit Button 2

Back in December, our Matt Hardigree touted these new features coming:

  • We’ve been testing a new commenting system and our plan is to roll that out as fast as possible as opposed to upgrading the old one and then immediately tossing it out in favor of the new, better system. The new system has live notifications, better threading, rich media (emojis at the very least; we want to allow images, but we’re concerned about copyright stuff at the moment), upvoting, and a bunch of other features you’ve asked for and, frankly, we should have.
  • We still want to give people a chance to transition their old accounts and user names while they can so we’re not going to do this immediately. Additionally, we want to test it now that Memberful is live to make sure there’s no weirdness we didn’t expect.

Matt has some good news about this. He’s meeting with our tech team next week so he can prepare an update on the rollout of our new commenting system. We’re still testing this system and we hope to deploy it soon. How soon? We cannot say at this very moment. I can say that we’re right there with you in wanting that full-featured commenting system, and it’s coming as soon as we can roll it out. Again, thank you all for hanging in there and being with us on this journey!

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56 thoughts on “The Things You Readers Would Do For An Edit Button: COTD”

  1. Re spam filter.
    Why don’t we have a slightly more aggressive spam filter. But with a whitelist. Paying members get whitelisted automatically. Their posts will never be held up by the filter. If for some reason a paying account decides to post links to his $99/hr job, he can be blacklisted.

    Everybody else gets subjected to the slightly more aggressive spam filter. They can be whitelisted as their comments get reviewed. IDK if that’s feasible, but i can’t see why not.

    1. Also, my gosh, I cannot wait to link to *absolutely any other website* on my username than the author profile from the site that laid me off. Swap it for Goatse, I don’t care, but having every post of mine link to an author page that hasn’t been added to in months has been bothering me.

      (No offense to the folks who didn’t get laid off there, as they’re still doing good work, I’m sure.)

  4. Are all those features good? yes, yes they are. Are they needed? No, no they are not.
    Why?
    Because so far this site is doing all the right things at the core; low/no moderation of comments, excellent content, swear words from Torch. Every once in a while I roam over the the old site (when content here might be light) and uggg… Keep doing what and how you’re doing it. Good things are worth waiting for, meanwhile your content is worth the odd misspelling getting through.

  8. “We’re still testing this system and we hope to deploy it soon. How soon?”
    What the Hell am I editing? When does this happen?
    Now. Whatever you’re looking at now, is happening now.
    Well, what happened to then?
    We just passed it.
    When?
    Just now.
    Well, go back to then.
    We can’t.
    Why not?
    We already passed it.
    When will then be now?
    Soon.

  9. I say take your time with the rollout and don’t beta test on the kommentariat. Don’t drag your feet, sure, but don’t treat us like Tesla buyers either.

    1. That’s some serious dedication.

      But the horrible thing is that I can understand. It’s good that he lives on a different continent so that I can’t make the same offer. (And no I will not work on that stupid/holy grail* Chrysler sitting in a country next to me)

      * strike out what does not apply

  11. I’m a tech person who’s built a lot of software. I hate it when people say things like “it can’t be that hard” or “anyone could build twitter in a weekend” or other similar uninformed dismissive tripe.

    However, I will say it here. Commenting systems and spam filters are solved problems. They have been since the early to mid 2010s. Disqus, discourse, even WordPress have that functionality nailed.

    Why is the Autopian having such a hard time with this? Are you rolling your own or something?

    1. As a tech consultant, a.k.a. that pesky middle-man between the end user and development, I appreciate the dedication to testing and concern for an easy transition for the users. I also have to imagine this is quite the learning experience for our overlords.

      1. They’ve collectively been in web publishing for like two millennia. The CMS and commenting tech stuff shouldn’t be difficult, compared to everything else they’re doing to get this site off the ground.

  15. “And it’s not just you, sometimes I will comment on something and our spam killer gets mad at me.”

    Can somebody let Mercedes out of the greys please?

      1. Where’s the thumb down button?
        I was in the “greys” for years until Mercedes finally set me free.
        I have a fair amount of experience as both an admin, mod and plain old user of various forums.
        The best systems I have seen are based on initial email verification, a membership with introduction and trust built by time and number of posts. You can usually pick out the spammers pretty quick and if you have a user feedback system all the better.

          1. I never got it either. I was grayed forever on the old site and then I got out for a while and then was put back in for reasons that I still don’t know. That site’s not worth going to anymore anyway so I just don’t bother.

      2. As someone who pretty actively checked them and popped people out (or in) as needed, it was an okay workaround for the barrage of spam/porn comments that the ‘picnic’s network got, but far from perfect. The biggest issue was that it was mighty labor-intensive to add “comment moderator” onto everyone’s job description, and some of the stuff folks would hurl at us is pretty jarring, not going to lie! Sometimes you’ve got to have all your other mental health affairs in order to even be in the right headspace to handle some anonymous jerk telling you to kill yourself in the greys on your own article.

        The greys functioning well depended on the staff having the extra time to pop into there and make sure every comment was where it needed to be. You learn to tell the difference between who’s a repeated troll who deserves a permaban and who’s just having a bad day over time, but that, too, takes a pretty substantial time investment of just hanging out in the comment section. I always kinda wanted a dedicated mod who wasn’t a writer for this so moderation wouldn’t get forgotten about on busy days, or so there’d be an impartial ear if someone was being directly harsh to us in the comments. Sometimes we deserved a critical comment, and a comment with some borderline trolling or name-calling could make a good enough point to bend the rules and allow. That line between personal attack and legit criticism is a tough one to ride sometimes, and we want the latter, not the former.

        Also, it wasn’t great for new commenters! The goal of any healthy comment section should be growth—in the good sense, of more actual humans having good conversations. Automatically popping folks into the greys as a new commenter wasn’t the best welcome mat.

        1. 8+ years down the track and I’m still in the greys for Lifehacker… No one lifts a finger there to ungrey anybody.

          Tovarisch ungreyed me on Jalopnik, and I got ungreyed on Gizmodo and Jezebel for some reason or another.

  16. I don’t have anything to say. But, the ad in the body of the article was stating that February is national canned food month. WTF is that?

  18. I’d like to dedicate this award to all those typos in my comments that will be memorialized here long after I’ve powerslid off this mortal coil.

    May future readers think even less of me than the current readers do.

    1. “May future readers think even less of me than the current readers do.”

      Must not make smartass comment…

      Must not make smartass comment…

      Must not make smartass comment… 🙂

  19. The Memberful user verification through email really sucks for me.
    Give me a username and password, even occasional 2-step text verification would be fine as long as it learns platform trust.
    I use various operating systems and web browsers and have no common email account over the platforms, so I get trapped back on my desktop for The Autopian.
    It is the most annoying feature of the website.

    1. Yeah, I’d really prefer a traditional password. I can’t log in to post if I have something open within an app browser like Instagram or Twitter, for one. The email link opens in my usual browser, at which point, I have to figure out where the heck the thing I was reading is all over again and overall, it just adds a lot of extra steps to posting during MY morning dump.

  21. “I’m not sure if that’s impressive or sad”

    Impressad?

    Thank you for the updates on the new features, etc. Even if some people are grumbly, I think the commenters know (and appreciate) that you guys are working hard behind the scenes to make improvements.

    I had a comment go to moderation earlier today. It seemed odd because it contained only text – no links or emoji – but I assumed it was a random thing due to the whack-a-bot efforts.

    1. That should be the new name for the Subaru Crosstrek!
      Increased HP – impressive.
      Loss of manual transmission – sad.
      The new Subaru Impressad!

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