Colin Walker

On comments and webmentions

Colin Walker

# In reply to: Depending on how they show up, I'll sometimes take webmentions which show up as "XXX mentioned this on YYY" and change the metadata in wp_comments...

There seems to be a lot of inconsistency in the way webmentions and microformats are handled or implemented between different platforms, especially Known and WordPress.

I've had to dive into the database on a number of occasions to add webmention as the comment type because it has not been detected properly.

While we can do this we certainly shouldn't have to.

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  1. desparoz says: #
    You're absolutely right. This will be a key tipping point for the success of new tech like micro blogging - is it simple for non-technically minded people to use and implement? You and I might be willing to play around to make things work, but most people aren't.
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  2. Chris Aldrich says: #
    Some of the issue is that WordPress has a huge number of plugins which adds a lot of additional complexity (especially for Micropub clients) which isn't always going to be handled by every client. As for webmentions, they're being bolted onto WordPress which doesn't have (or allow) a custom comment type, so they're jury-rigged in the best manner possible. There is still ongoing work, especially with the Semantic Linkbacks Plugin which does a lot of the heavy lifting here, if you've got thoughts/ideas, you should certainly weigh in on those Github issues as they are evolving. I know there were a handful of quirks that have been changed in Known in the past months to fix some issues with microformats that were being parsed incorrectly, and thus caused other platforms like WordPress not to let them display as nicely when received. I think most have been merged and a new release of Known was pushed yesterday and should hopefully clear up some of these issues. I think the developers of the WordPress plugins and even the Known community are very responsive, so feel free to jump in with feedback, suggestions, or even pull requests on any of the pieces which are all on GitHub. I'm sure there will be some remaining rough edges, but in general a lot of them have been smoothed over in the past year and most improvements now seem to be geared towards making the suite of tools more user friendly or to better extend the functionality.
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