DWiki's comment system is acceptable as it stands (the proof is in the pudding, in that some people are willing to use it), but it needs to be improved. Specifically, it's been clear to me for a while that there should be 'your name' and 'your website' fields so that people can conveniently identify themselves.

(And so I can have a better idea of who's leaving comments. The current DWiki comment system dates to when it was a half-hearted addition glued on to something I expect to be used primarily as an internal wiki.)

This is a bit of a project, since the comment storage format needs to change (and thus the code needs to deal with comments in either format), but it's not too much work, at least in theory. In practice I have been not doing this for some time; I've wound up in coding paralysis, where I know what I want to do but I can't can't moving on it.

At its heart, my coding paralysis is because I don't feel enthused enough about the changes I want to make; they are feeling too much like work and not enough like fun. At the same time I've thought enough about them that they've become locked in my mind as the 'next step' I want to do, so I don't even think about other DWiki changes that might be more fun.

Probably this really means that I need to find something completely different to code up and obsess over.

Sidebar: some gory details

One reason for my coding paralysis is scope creep; I've let what I want to achieve get too big. For example, I know that I want to add OpenID support someday, and I don't really want to make two significant changes to the comment handling code, so I should really do that as part of the significant revision. But adding OpenID is a bunch of work, and is going to require a bunch of thinking about how to best to add it to DWiki's processing models; it's effectively a significant project on its own, and yet I'm trying to wedge it into my first change.

Another reason is that a chunk of the coding is grunge work, out of proportion to the coolness of the feature it adds. Adding fields to comments requires a new comment storage format and dealing sensible with both old and new comments, which is a bunch of boring code (and I didn't put version information into the comment storage format; bad me).