We have updated the Baseball Prospectus Manage Profile page to offer the ability to choose your preferred comment hiding behavior for both the normal article pages and the printed version of the article pages. We have gotten a number of requests from people who were often having to override the default behavior (usually because they either really love to read comments or really hate them), so hopefully the updated behavior will be more accommodating to these users.
This update got me to wondering: are there any other “simple” customizations like this that we can offer that would make you user experience much happier? Let us know in the comment thread below and we’ll definitely consider them. Please use the comment rating system to rate up any ideas you particularly like but don’t have additional input on so that we can avoid a bunch of “me too” submissions.
Several times I have made non-obscene comments that challenged the person writing the article, only to see them blocked. BP writers often claim the organization does not encourage groupthink. But the comment rating system does.
It's just the way it happens. I've had my comments negatived out, then someone else rephrases the idea and it gets good feedback. It's just the way it goes.
I don't know about most readers, but I tend to read the blocked comments before I read others. I would bet being blocked actually increases the number of readers and responses, possibly to the benefit of the discussion.
I agree with your general point, but just wanted to point out that there is an "inappropriate" link for the offensive ones. Which leaves minus for the dumb ones.
When we put together the comments system we tried really hard to put measures in place to keep the threads as "low noise" as possible to keep threads from degrading into flame wars or off-topic side discussions. This is why we don't allow anonymous comments and why we implemented the comment rating system. Basically, ranking is there to give our comment threads a fighting chance of staying relevant without making our staff moderate everything.
Obviously, "relevance" is subjective so you will not always agree with how the mob votes, but we are pretty happy with the choices it has made historically. When we look back at old comment threads, we tend to think the system works pretty well.
So I guess what I'm saying is we have to do SOMETHING if we want to keep threads relevant. If you don't like the comment rating system, what would you propose we replace it with?
I've seen threadas go way off topic with nary a negative vote and I've seen some comments flagged negative that went through interesting conversations all the while remaining on topic. I don't think it affects the noise and there's still the flagging option
I like the +/- since it shows the comments other BPers like but because of the above I rarely keep a comment hidden. I also prefer a YouTube style tally as opposed to a net +/- because as a commentator it lets me know just how many people thought my comment was provocative enough to take the time to vote for/against it.
This has happened to me also, I've seen the article changed to reflect what inconsistency i pointed out and my comment removed like it never happened. Not appreciated.
I'd love to see the RSS Feed somehow alert me to ALL the new content avaialable each day, including the chats and newsletter. I use the internet nearly exclusively through my RSS Reader, and this would really be helpful. I'm guessing it would be fantastically simple, too.
How would you want us to handle RSS entries for "timed" content - like chats or roundtables? Would we add an entry when the event is scheduled, when the event starts or when the event has ended (at which point there will be a full transcript to point to). I don't spend much time reading RSS feeds so I'm not sure which behavior would be most useful.
Also, newsletters are scheduled differently for each user now, so in order to accurately account for this in the RSS feed we might have to start using some sort of user-specific RSS feed setup. Or I guess we could just pick a newsletter time and run with it for RSS feeds. Any thoughts?
I've requested this feature before. In fact, I'd like to see RSS everywhere in the site--if I want to subscribe to "Prospectus Today," in addition to the all articles feed, you should let me. If you RSS every bit of content you put out, users can mash together their own customized aggregations, though I wouldn't mind you offering it as an option anyway.
In terms of timing for the chats, I vote for one post when chats are scheduled and another for when the transcript is available. RSS isn't designed to be realtime exactly, so I don't see much value in announcing a chat is starting. That kind of info should be Tweeted.
FWIW, I don't care about the newsletter. Yeah, I technically still get one but it just gets filtered into a folder I never check. Welcome to 2009, here's your RSS reader, please keep the line moving ...
I agree that the newsletter is a waste. I'm sure it is great for some folks though.
It's funny that Will criticizes MLB for not allowing embedded video, but BP doesn't offer access to it's articles in any form besides "old-fashioned" HTML. It would be great to get full article RSS feeds.
If the BP Twitter account wasn't used in the exact same way as the RSS feed I think it would be more useful for announcing events. I think it would be cool if it also pushed big announcements like signings or that so-and-so was going for a no-hitter, etc.
Just a hunch, but I strongly suspect that the main reason we can't do full RSS feeds of articles is because the great majority of them are behind the subscription wall.
No, that doesn't make sense. You already do a full RSS feed for all the articles, it's just that they're just headlines that link back to the site, so no authentication issue there. All we (or at least I) want is for things like chats to also get pushed, and for there to be faceted RSS feeds: a separate feed for each article's comments, separate one's for each author's articles, etc.
I'm not sure I understand this suggestion. Are you asking for a different rating behavior or just a different view of the existing rating (ie. showing you "3 positive and 4 negative votes" instead of "-1") ?
This would show (in theory) how many people agree/like the comment/think it was appropriate (+) and how many people disagree/disliked the comment/thought it was inappropriate (-) rather than have the minority opinion trampled out by the majority opinion with in one number.
On a player's PECOTA page, I would love to see a list of articles that reference that player. That would give a handy connection to Will's injury updates on the player, or Christina's analysis of any transactions in which that player was involved...sounds very helpful to me! I assume the links in the articles to the player pages appear automatically, so would it be too hard to have those links show up in the other direction also?
"This has happened to me also, I've seen the article changed to reflect what inconsistency i pointed out and my comment removed like it never happened. Not appreciated."
For a site that carries a pretty high transparency quotient, that's a credibility problem that should not be allowed to persist. You guys are generally good acknowledging mistakes, so I will assume the issues pointed out were not large, but it bears watching.
I strongly agree with this, enough to comment, not just add a +1. Basically, Check out what any major news organization does with corrections; the minimum bar to cross is a "the article as been corrected with the following" note at the end.
I don't mean to cast blanket aspersions on anyone, but have you ever thought that maybe people give you negative feedback not because of the content in your post, but the annoying or obnoxious way in which you phrase it?
Just a brief addendum: this post wasn't really intended as a discussion on the comment system specifically (although your criticisms are noted). What I'm most interested in at this point is specific convenience features that we can implement on the site to make your experience better. If you have a comment-related FEATURE you'd like us to implement, then we definitely want to hear about it.
My concern is that we're going to lose some good specific suggestions in the noise of the more general comment rating discussion.
Tagging! Let's face it, your search function just ain't all that great. Let the writers, editors, and readers tag articles and posts and lets see what kind of folksonomy grows: BABIP, Predictions the Author Would Rather Forget, Yet Another Reason Why Joe Morgan is an Idiot (YARWJMI).
Don't know if this falls in the realm of "simple", but how about comments on just about every page? In the same way that people had some interesting discussion below this year's depth charts, conversations could grow around certain players or stat reports. Or chats, for that matter.
Anyone else having smartphone problems with certain ads? The IQ test used to crash my IE browser through windows mobile 6.0 OS. Now I have probs with a Sony ad and some teddy bear ad.
This is really nit picky, but I'd like to be able to set a custom font on the print page or better just have it default to my default font instead of assigning one through CSS.
Mostly I'd really like to be able to get the full text of articles in my RSS reader. I wouldn't mind an iPhone app that allowed articles to be easily read off line and maybe have a few stats in the pocket so to speak. When I travel, I tend to miss days of BP (the horror!) because it's just not as easy to access the articles and save them as any arbitrary website. If I could just get articles into Instapaper (http://www.instapaper.com/), I'd be a happy man.
I like the idea of adding all the relevant content (links to articles, etc) to a players PECOTA page. If that can't be done for technical reasons, one spot with links and data on that player would be really appreciated.
Search function for chats would be great, please. I hate when I half remember a KG comment on a prospect and I have to go to 8 different chat pages to try to find it.
I agree--the rollover and expand ads are a lot more intrusive than I expect from a site I'm paying for. Also, my browser or my firewall doesn't let me post replies, which is why this is at the bottom of the page--but I think that's for me to fix.
What about a customizable front page? For instance, I just don't have the time to go through all of the TA files, yet occasionally that's the top pick on the list. Something similar to Yahoo or iGoogle so that the content I'm most interested in rises to the top.
Would be nice to extend the ability to discern new from old comments in the TA and Prospect blog pages. Right now, they look the same.
Also, as others have said, there has to be a better way to advertise (less intrusive) on a pay site.
1) full text of articles in RSS feeds
2) RSS feeds available for specific columns/authors as an alternative to everything published on the site
3) support for Instapaper
to clarify, if I mark a BP article to "read later" on Instapaper I can't pull up the full article on my iPhone app. all I see is the preview non-subscribers have access to. The same issue exists for Read It Later which is a service similar to Instapaper. Fixing this would allow me to get a lot more value out of my BP subscription and would make me more likely to renew
56 comments have been left for this post.
I hate the comment rating system.
Several times I have made non-obscene comments that challenged the person writing the article, only to see them blocked. BP writers often claim the organization does not encourage groupthink. But the comment rating system does.
It's just the way it happens. I've had my comments negatived out, then someone else rephrases the idea and it gets good feedback. It's just the way it goes.
I don't know about most readers, but I tend to read the blocked comments before I read others. I would bet being blocked actually increases the number of readers and responses, possibly to the benefit of the discussion.
IMO people should only minus out offensive or *really* dumb comments (or those who make niggling grammatical corrections- I HATE those people).
Too many times people minus out comments they simply disagree with. It does get out of hand.
I agree with your general point, but just wanted to point out that there is an "inappropriate" link for the offensive ones. Which leaves minus for the dumb ones.
When we put together the comments system we tried really hard to put measures in place to keep the threads as "low noise" as possible to keep threads from degrading into flame wars or off-topic side discussions. This is why we don't allow anonymous comments and why we implemented the comment rating system. Basically, ranking is there to give our comment threads a fighting chance of staying relevant without making our staff moderate everything.
Obviously, "relevance" is subjective so you will not always agree with how the mob votes, but we are pretty happy with the choices it has made historically. When we look back at old comment threads, we tend to think the system works pretty well.
So I guess what I'm saying is we have to do SOMETHING if we want to keep threads relevant. If you don't like the comment rating system, what would you propose we replace it with?
I've seen threadas go way off topic with nary a negative vote and I've seen some comments flagged negative that went through interesting conversations all the while remaining on topic. I don't think it affects the noise and there's still the flagging option
I like the +/- since it shows the comments other BPers like but because of the above I rarely keep a comment hidden. I also prefer a YouTube style tally as opposed to a net +/- because as a commentator it lets me know just how many people thought my comment was provocative enough to take the time to vote for/against it.