Comments/Ratings for a Single Item
I fall between Peter and David here. When I write a comment, I don't really plan it. Something in the page, or another comment sets me off, and I just start writing. If it leads somewhere not completely germaine to the page being commented on, so be it. BUT, the result is that discussions that are potentially interesting or inspiring get buried attached to pages that effectively conceal them from later browsers. (Look at the recent discussion attached to the 'Archoniclastic Chess' page.) To do the thing properly, comments should be limited to the variant they are attached to, and any flight of fancy should be moved to the discussion group. I think this is against human nature (at least mine) and I would probably never make 50% of those posts. Furthermore, the discussion group posting may be cryptic outside of context of the variant page that inspired it. On the other side, the number of people 'misusing' the comment system are relatively small. It would be a huge waste of time and resources to build a parallel discussion system for a handful of 'chatterers'. Also, the public discussion board has a better possibility of attracting random searchers. Maybe a compromise is possible. Let me note here that I am no programmer, and I have no idea how difficult any particular idea would be to implement. An idea that seems simple to me might be to allow the writer of an extended comment to select a small set of keywords ('Ruddigore', 'double-move') which the comment system could also search for. Better ideas?
The comment system allows you to see the whole discussion on one page, instead of needing to access (and then page down past all the garbage) a new page for each message. This is a huge advantage, and I expect that people will abandon the yahoo thingy and flock to the chessvariants.com comment pages.
For those who constantly check the what's new page, I have created the 'Minimal New' page, which just gives a short summary on when the latest comment was made, and when the latest item was added or updated. The address is: http://www.chessvariants.com/index/new.php
This comment is about the whole site: Do you know just how many dead links to external pages you have?
I have replaced the listcomments.php script with a new script. This new script uses PDO methods instead of mysql functions, and it changes how it pages through the comments. The old script used the offset method, which grew more expensive with each page of links further away from the origin. The new script uses the first and last keywords to indicate a specific starting point from which to count ahead or count down additional comments. This works just as quickly for any point in the Comment table, and it provides links that will identify the same set of comments even when additional comments are added.
The default is now to list comments in ascending order instead of descending order, and order=DESC must be set to list comments in descending order. This is to make it explicit when comments are being listed in descending order. The new script uses the sort keyword instead of the sortbydate keyword, and it can take different column names for values. It defaults to CommentID. But until I change the links, it will change the order value to DESC, so that old links can still function as they used to. The link on the home page has already been corrected, since it did not include any parameters. For further details on parameters, click on the Help link, or add the help parameter to the URL.
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