Chris's Wiki :: blog/web/WeblogNoComment

The easy way to get me to not comment on a weblog

January 12, 2007

It's simple: just don't offer any sort of comment preview option.

This insures that I will never leave a comment, no matter how much I have something I want to say. Without the chance to preview my work before I'm committed to it, I feel too nervous and it becomes too much of an annoyance.

This is one of those blog software things that really puzzle me. It is not as if blogs all format comments in the same way, so I would think that software authors would see the attraction of people being able to check that they got it right before they post their comment. (For bonus points, a number of the 'no comment preview' blogs I've run across also have no explanation of how your comment text will get formatted, or how to include links, or etc.)

This isn't the only reason to want to see a comment preview, of course. In many cases, comment preview is the first time you see the whole text of your comment at once, since most comment form textareas are dinky and grow scrollbars once you have more than a little bit of text (which make it much harder to get a sense of your comment as a coherent whole, since you have to hold everything out of the scroll area in your mind).

Another effect I've personally experienced is that it's hard to judge how big a paragraph or block of text will be in a comment textarea, because it is in a different font than the final version (textareas are all in monospace, and often in a different size). What feels right in the textarea not infrequently turns out to be too small and too little text when I preview it. (This can be exacerbated by links and the like, which take up extra space in the source but not in the final result.)

(And I just plain benefit from being able to step back a bit and reread my draft comment; often what looked good when I wrote it is not so hot once I preview it. I revise my draft comments a lot.)

While I have a rather limited sample, looking at comment form usage patterns here on WanderingThoughts suggests that I am not alone in this; a number of commentators here seem to go through multiple preview drafts. (Not all of them, though; some are more write and go people.)

Comments on this page:

From 71.141.225.199 at 2007-01-13 10:50:49:

What I hate more, I think, are blog comment previews that do not look the same as the final result. The linespacing is different, some tags are stripped in the final, etc.

I have encountered more than one of these. More than two, if I'm not mistaken.

At least if there's no preview you can just bail and use ASCII markup (i.e. DWiki-style markup that's not processed).

--nothings

By DanielMartin at 2007-01-29 10:42:51:

The comment pages on http://scienceblogs.com have an especially annoying comment preview "feature": the comment text returned to you isn't escaped properly.

Let me explain: scienceblogs uses some variant of Moveable Type, and the comment stuff there uses limited html as its markup language. Specifically, < is what you type if you want your comment to include <. If you just type an unadorned <, then that's interpreted as an unallowed html tag, and you lose all text until either an unadorned > or the end of the line.

Anyway, if you have a comment which has < in it, when you hit preview to see that the comment works properly you'll see that everything is fine except that in the text box below the preview (where you should have your comment text for further tweaking) all of your <s have been turned into unadorned <s. The effect of this is that if you hit preview and think that your comment is fine, hitting "post" at that point will post a mangled comment.

There is apparently some deep Moveable Type issue with the version in use at scienceblogs that doesn't understand how to properly escape ampersands when sending text back to the browser's textarea box. I suspect that someone was trying to be clever and flexible in accepting what people typed in, and did it clumsily.

This wouldn't be an issue on most blogs, but on a science-related blog site, problems with comments that use < gets to be annoying.

By cks at 2007-01-30 00:01:40:

What I suspect is going on with the scienceblogs comment form is a textarea gotcha that is sufficiently tangled I've turned it into a blog entry, TextareaGotcha.

(The easy way to test if my theory is right is to try to preview a comment that has something like '</textarea> <h1> BOO! </h1>' and see if the BOO! comes out as a big headline.)

Written on 12 January 2007.

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