I think you just summed up the internet :-)

The only time you will have a chance at real and productive conversation is if the post is about design or some sort of skilled trade where the visitors are tying to grow or show off their skill.

There really doesn’t seem to be a place where people of different ideas and views can come together and discuss and share views peacefully. The worst part about comments online is not simply that the users have short attention span, it’s that they are the same people talking AT each other on the street.

To echo a commenter somewhere else, I like the “authenticate with Twitter” comment model better than the “tweet your comment” model. Little bits of peanut gallerying will just never do it for me.

Secondly, your timer idea is a good one Mike, but on some sites I’ve spent a long time carefully editing my comment to the point that I’ve actually used a separate text editor so I can keep saving it. I can then go to the website and just paste it in. What happens then with your system? I assume the timer would show one second or less, and my comment would be wrongly marked as spam.

Sorry, thanks

About setTimeout, all the places I see it referenced is mainly in:

https://mikeindustries.com/wp/wp-content/themes/Mike-Industries-Two/sifr.js

And that code is minified.

You mind pasting the setTimeout function code to the comment section so that I can read the human version of it?

Thanks

Choosing not to use @ replies makes it feel like a desperate attempt to drive traffic their way, rather than a way to engage the community in meaningful discussion.

Jason: Sure. It’s a simple javascript timer. View source on this page and look for “setTimeout” and you can see exactly what it does. I don’t want to release it as a plug-in or otherwise heavily publicize it because I’d like to keep the Russian Spam Army off the scent for as long as possible. Seems to have worked so far, and I get over 100,000 page views a month on this blog.

Christian: I find that to be the case only on the largest of properties. Most of us run pretty small operations and our readership is more thoughtful than, say, the run-and-gun population of large general news sites. I fully understand why a blog like Daring Fireball doesn’t turn comments on, because it’s SO big and so full of readers who want to argue every last point with John, but for 99% of us, that just isn’t a problem. I also don’t consider a rambling off-topic comment thread harmful to the blog entry itself. It’s just extra information at the bottom of it. If you want to read it, great. If you don’t, you can always move on.

This cuts both ways.

Why spend ten minutes reading a poorly-written blog post or comment if its thesis states the main point succinctly and the rest of the content is filler? Your argument is valid so long as the author, or commenter, writes well and has something valuable to say. Historically on the Web, and especially in comments, that’s the exception rather than the rule.

Happy Cog’s Twitter system solves two problems: The rambling comment that could have been shorter (such as this one, perhaps) and the inability to track follow-up comments in a useful, non-email way without re-visiting the site.

Brevity encourages spam, to be sure, but it also skims off a lot of the time-wasting writing and reading that’s also damaging to the ecology of the Web.

You mind explaining more about your spam prevention code (and maybe show some source code).

I’d like to use the same.

And if it’s simply a plugin, would you mind pointing me to it.

Thanks