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[meta] Keeping track of new comments in blogoscoped forum

Rohit Srivastwa [PersonRank 10]

Tuesday, October 23, 2007
16 years ago5,185 views

How do you guys keep an eye on new comments coming on old forum posts? Apart from coming directly on the website & keep refreshing the page. I mean RSS tells your what new topic is there in the forum, but comments???

Anyone game for writing a Firefox extension to assist this task :)

Rohit Srivastwa [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

How are people keeping up with this

Anyone doing anything else other than keep browsing the forum page & checking top threads??

stefan2904 [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

"browsing the forum page & checking top threads"
jep!

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I simply load the forum page and look for any red links on the right hand side. Assuming you always click this last post link, this indicates which threads you're up to date with. I then always read oldest to newest so that I can stop at any time and continue later.

Rohit Srivastwa [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

need to have something better here. Feeling like an RSS for comments of forum. As we can see the database ID is generated with every comment, something to tap it so that all the threads can be monitored.

Sometime you forget some old thread & a msg might be waiting there for you :)

Philipp, any idea?

David Hetfield [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I do the same thing Tony does. :)

Keith Chan [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I agree we need something more convenience here ...

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Many have suggested to subscribe to a thread via email. The thing is, this server isn't really handling that side too well – emails get sent out late, sometimes not at all, and it might cause a lot of issues on the side. An RSS per thread – hmm, maybe that will cause a lot of automated polling (once per half hour?) of a lot of threads (I'm caching a lot of things, like posts, so that the server can handle it, but the forum is uncached)... if anyone has a suggestion on this whole issue what you'd like to see to track this better?

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Philipp, I think what Rohit is looking for is another forum feed with latest comments rather than latest new threads. If that's the case, it's a matter of dumping what appears on the forum page (since that's sorted by latest comment, and not the thread creation date) and some additional data like the content of the comment which does not appear on that page.

What you're describing is an actual feed per thread, which would also be very useful when trying to follow a particular thread. But as you mentioned, that one is difficult to scale. The other one, at least on the surface, seems simpler since it's sort of doing what you're already doing on the forum page, so it may not even require any additional queries.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

<< Philipp, I think what Rohit is looking for is another forum feed with latest comments rather than latest new threads. >>

It used to be this way but it wasn't very useful IMHO. Whenever a comment appeared in the forum feed, you had no idea on context and what had appeared before it, etc. So that meant you had to click back to the forum to read the entire thread. I think the only viable solution here is to visit the forum more frequently and check every thread... :-)

mukthar [PersonRank 7]

16 years ago #

Also, I would like to see a post edit option. Atleast for some minutes after posting, for the person who posted the actual comment.

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Tony, I agree...otherwise my feed reader just gets flooded due to the amount of activity here :)

Mrrix32 [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I have the post RSS feed in Google reader but I wouldn't want it to tell me every single time there was a reply.

Kirby Witmer [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

in a totally unrelated note...

check out this post on the official google blog..

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/11/attack-of-20ers.html

then take note of the iphone screenshot in the post..

http://bp1.blogger.com/_QriD2y6VZ-Y/RzDuIJjDRpI/AAAAAAAAAHc/fin37WafC9U/s1600/iphone-screenshot.gif

look toward the bottom.. see anything familiar about that? :)

Mrrix32 [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

[put at-character here]kirby
lol, hadn't seen that. You've got a good eyesight :)

James Xuan [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Cool!

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