Commenting

Looking at my options for migration – and yes, I’m aware that I can still use the old editor for a while but I’d rather bite the bullet given the issues the new and “improved” editor presents for basic writing that they’re just unresponsive about fixing such as still not allowing block elements like lists to be nested inside of blockquotes despite it being explicitly allowed, or making it obnoxious to run together multi-paragraph formatting – it’s a no contest for exportation. Ghost. That is still somewhat time-sensitive as the current WP plugin hasn’t been updated for V2 yet, though running it through V1 before updating isn’t a huge deal, I’ve got instances/etc. set aside, and the v2 update is so brand new that I suspect it’s just a matter of time before the export plugin from the ghost foundation gets updated.

The real question is: comments. Since I’ve been using built-in WP comments, they’re effectively non-portable without more programming work than I care for, no matter the platform I shift to.

Incidentally, commenting aside, one of the nice things about ghost is the exports are properly tagged/marked up JSON. You could easily map the formatting to any set of database fields you wanted, for various values of easy.

So first question is “should I bother?”. I’m not of the “everybody just wants to see meeeee and noone has anything useful to add” persuasion, but since I link out to G+ and Oneway, if people want to comment they can reach me there. To a lesser degree this is true of commenting on the article itself from a public interaction standpoint. The other locations I link in provide a means for byplay, and regardless of the commenting system put in place, it’s an invitation for spam.

The second is “if so, what?” : I know it’s one of the most commonly requested features, yet almost completely ignored by the dev team. I can see why – see spam, security issues of code injection, etc. That leaves outside commenting systems like Disqus, Livefyre, etc., or building up an entire BBS system like nodeBB just to handle the commenting – see again spam, maanging security, etc.

In short, If I do stick with comments, I’ve either got to tack on an outside system – easy – but one that is subject to their rules of content enforcement along with offloading the spam and registration aspects, or I have to build, integrate, and manage a second platform.

I’m willing to go either way, but since so few, relatively speaking, actually comment, I’d like to know what the people who take the time to do so want.