Colin Walker

# I was thinking about comments and how I effectively use micro.blog as a commenting system; I receive m.b replies via webmention but they include the @mention at the start of the text.

I thought about hooking in to comment_post() to strip the @mention from the front of the comment as it is submitted but this would leave a before and after situation. Instead, I decided to achieve the same thing nondestructively by checking for it at display time. Now my comment parser checks if the comment text starts with a link from micro.blog and strips it out for display purposes.

See this post for an example.

I've often thought about this and found it to be a little jarring when viewing the comments in the context of the blog. As it's nondestructive I can always reverse the change if I find the flow of comments stop making sense but I prefer them this way.

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  1. bix says: #
    It kind of drives me nuts, but even if I removed them (and I think I can do it even on an M.b-hosted blog), it removes the context of who someone might actually have been replying to on M.b. I'm not sure how to retain both things—clarity of responses and a better visual.
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  2. Colin Walker says: #
    Yeah, that's why I've kept the option to revert. If the comments flow okay then it won't be an issue but if it gets too messed up I'll have to go back. At least the links are all still in place to see the comment in the original context.
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  4. manton says: #
    Nice work! This is cool. I like to keep the usernames in, but I agree it can be messy unless there are a few threads going on at once. Maybe later we could offer a nested version of the conversation API to help with that.
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  5. Colin Walker says: #
    Thanks. I just feel, as self-hosted, I didn't want to force the @'s on people. But now that there is a link in place to view the conversation on m.b it's not so much of an issue if things look a little janky.
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