Thanks to the arcane magicks of Discover web producer Gemma Shusterman, this blog now offers the latest in commenting technology: the ability to edit your own comments! That’s right: after you type in the comment and hit “Submit,” for the next fifteen minutes you will be able to go back and change what you wrote. We expect that this will totally eliminate the appearance of typos or mistakes of judgment in any further comments. (Note that, in order to actually leave a comment, you have to click on the post title.)
You’ll also notice that the name of the author now appears at the top of the post, which is very helpful. We have a list of upgrades we’re trying to gradually implement, in order to make your blog-reading experience as pleasant as possible.
And comments have numbers on them! Amazing what technology can do.
While the edit-after-posting option is excellent, it doesn’t seem like a complete replacement for the (missing) “Preview” button.
Edit: the ticking countdown timer is nice, if a little unnerving!
I don’t get the ads here at home, but at work (shush!) I was mildly surprised to the see a Templeton ad here on Discover. I take it they’re accepted in the same spirit and the “2012 WILL KILL US ALL!! DOOM!! DOOM!! DOOM!!” ads on Universe Today.
Templeton’s money helps keep the magazine going, just like anyone else’s would. I’m not especially thrilled with it, but it’s a complicated issue — I hope to post about it in more detail soon.
Connection between this post title and the next one? We should be told.
Sometimes accidents are more clever than intents.
(Another aphorism with no connection to that other post.)
Hmm, I actually preferred the author name at the end.. I would read articles and spend the whole article trying to guess who the author was, then check if I got it right 🙂
let’s test this
edit: I thought editing also meant I could delete my comment.
Hmm…
???
THANK YOU! I strongly prefer author links at the top.
Now if only the ” comments” in the header were actually a link to the comments…. 🙂
The bloggy overlords are aware of that feature, and will hopefully get us a patch soon.
As someone who asked for the author to be moved to the top of the posts so we didn’t have to scroll down to the bottom before we read the post to figure out who were were reading, thanks! Although, I am getting pretty good at figuring out who wrote what. I can almost always figure out when its Sean.
Linking the comments to the comments is another nice one. Honestly, it would be better if when you clicked the comments link it just showed them to you on the same page using ajax. Forcing us to click the title to go to another page is just a dirty way to get ad impressions. It’s one of the things thats very broken about Internet business models right now. Advertisers assume that an “impression” is an actual human being looking at the ad but thats not really how it works. I believe they call this sort of thing inflation? Anyway, it’s part of the reason sites such as the WSJ are going behind a paywall – its a very broken business model.
I’m delighted by the author at the top feature, but mildly concerned that you seem to have missed the fact that it takes exactly 17 minutes to discover a typo in this universe.
Interesting.