Tornworld.net

We need more comments! Comments not only make our authors' and artists' day, it's an important way for our site to look active and inviting. Look at all those things that are up now with no comments - very dull and boring looking. So, for the rest of the month, all comments will earn you an automatic *5* karma, instead of the usual 1. A good time to stock up! And just look at all the nifty things you can get with your karma: http://www.tornworld.net/members/spendkarma.php

This interesting article in Ergofiction relates to this topic: http://www.ergofiction.com/2010/07/surv ... -feedback/

I liked some of the ideas that came up in the comments of that article, too. I had been toying with the idea of buttons that allowed you to express a few basic reactions to a story without the hassle of a comment - and also to enable private and/or anonymous comments.

The buttons idea I started stewing on originally after getting a Facebook account - sometimes it's a lot easier to just click 'like' than write a full comment. What buttons would you want to see? I was thinking maybe: write more on this topic (maybe a pencil or feather pen icon?), '!', a heart or love icon, maybe a brain icon (made me think), or a wrench (needs work). Do we want to include critical buttons? I thought maybe each choice would 'cost' a karma (which goes to the contributor), but I'm not sure about that.

You would have to be logged in to use it, so it's still not useful for anonymous visitors. (Though, hm... it would be neat if they had ONE option as a visitor, and could see the other options but not use them??? This option would not be counted with registered votes, it would be a visitors-only thing. The potential for abuse is... modest.)

The other idea was private or anonymous comments. I'm not super keen on allowing anonymous comments - it would still require a login, so it wouldn't be open to everyone, and generally people are only anonymous when they're saying things they don't want people to know they're saying. And there IS a system for private comments, embedded in the karma, since you can send the contributor a note with karma and no one else will see it. This actually also allows anonymous comments, but it costs you at least 1 karma to send it, so maybe that's already covered. Possibly, it should be made more obvious.

How about replies to comments? Is that something you'd be interested in??? I've gotten several that I'd love to reply to, but since the system isn't really set up for it, I haven't...