Rad.

Why not use Facebook likes?

While I tend to prefer a text response, the ability to +1 a post or comment is appreciated as well. Thanks for your hard work in getting this feature up and running!

I don't like the idea, to limit the ammount of answers to a post. At least for me, it made the comments much more readable, then before, when people had to refer to previous posts with the @ symbol.

Im no big fan of those features. I feel it tend to create a "pensée unique" effect, that is discouraging diverse point of views.

I can has notifications for when people reply to my comment or comment on an article I write thx

This is definitely cool. Any thoughts of forums? They could prove useful for starting new topics that aren't yet fleshed out for articles or blog posts. Also for keeping hot topics on the (forum) front page (articles get bumped off as they become old news).



'Like' if you want forums! :)

Thanks, guys, we've been itching for this for a while!

Thanks folks, we're looking into the "Unlike" issue!

Great job. It's an awesome feature to have for those of us who just prefer to lurk around or for the days when one has the time to read the comments but not formulate a coherent and constructive post.

The only problem that I have with a "like" feature is that it then turns many comments from a structured and levelled debate into a high-school popularity contest. This may not appear as vigorously on Gamasutra, due to many of the users being professional grade and intelligent individuals with a top notch administrative system (from what I've seen), but take any look at the hundreds of websites that have latched themselves to Facebook's "like" system, and you'll have a general idea of what I mean.

I dunno - adding a gamification system onto a website about professional game development is definitely ironic ;)



[EDIT] Also: unlike most places where you can "like" something, it's possible to edit your "committed" comments on Gamasutra - and there's no timeout on this facility. Is there anything in place to prevent abuse of this: people could write "i believe X" and then change it to "I believe Y" once the votes have rolled in...



[EDIT 2] Oh, and I appear to be able to "like" my own comments. Which seems a wee bit redundant...



Something like Slashdot's moderation system would possibly work better (i.e. an economic system where people can earn mod points to spend on other people's comments and/or mark the comments as being informative/funny/etc), but I suspect this only works well with a significantly huge user base.



Beyond that: I'm not too keen on the idea of limiting the number of replies to a post (though as someone who often responds to a response in a somewhat verbose way, I'm something of a guilty party and hence mildly biased!) - it'll most likely result in more confusion as people try to convert their "r2rs" into standard replies, thereby breaking the hierarchy of the "conversation". E.g.



comment 1

comment 1.1

comment 2

comment 2.1

comment "1.1.1"

comment 3

comment "2.1.1"

comment "1.1.1.1"

Etc...



(the other alternative is that people won't bother commenting - it'll certainly put me off crafting replies. Though it's left to the reader to decide if that's a positive or negative thing!)



Instead, it'd be nicer to have collapsible comments (again, as per Slashdot) - perhaps with everything past the third level defaulting to collapsed. This would reduce visual clutter while maintaining comment hierarchy.



And without wanting to sound like I want the moon on a stick, it'd be quite nice to have the following:

1) Could the "content" pillar in the middle be made dynamically resizable? I know we need to take handheld devices into account these days, but I'd expect most people these days to be browsing on high-resolution and/or widescreen displays these days - and increasing the amount of available space for content would make "r2r" comments wider and easier to read



(I've done something similar for www.xboxindiegames.co.uk: everything - including the side-bars - are dynamically collapsible and/or resizable...)



2) Could the "reply" feature offer some forum-style features, such as quoting and URLs? Again, I think the lack of these features is part of the reason why "r2r" comments were often difficult to read: the context wasn't always clear and "unformatted" URLs looked ugly - and were often broken up across multiple lines!



3) Could the reply textarea be resizable - again, it's quite small, especially when writing a reply, as it's crammed into the relatively small area next to your icon, rather than occupying the full width of the "content" column. Several times, I've ended up writing a response in Notepad (or Vi!) and then cut-n-pasting the response back into Gamasutra!

Alternatively, if a quoting system was built in, you could perhaps just copy the comment being replied to into the standard textarea at the bottom of the page, rather than inserting a textarea into the middle of the discussion hierarchy...

Mr. Graft, is there anything you can tell us (broadly) about the internal discussions that precipitated this change?



You said in a comment "but along with "Likes" we will moderate comments and review new commenters before allowing them to comment on our site."



Seems to me the comments to date are generally well behaved with the overwhelming majority of commenters being reasonable adults. Even with serious disagreements occurring every now and then, nothing seems to have errupted into the sort of flamewar you see elsewhere. So I'm mostly just curious on the thought processes that lead those concerned to believe moderating was a necessary addition.

One suggestion I have: Limit the size of replies to a few paragraph's worth.



Comment threads like these should really just be blog posts:

http://gamasutra.com/blogs/BrandonKarratti/20110927/8533/Choice_and_Singularity.
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