Hey gang! Just a heads-up. Roll to Disbelieve is test-driving a new commenting system called the World Table in the next day or two.
You can see it in motion here for now, and here’s a video outlining the basics:
The idea is pretty simple, and it won’t mean a lot of changes for most folks. Simply put, there’ll be way less of a problem from anonymous trolls to make trouble on blogs because people use a social-media account to participate in this system, and their comments follow them around very easily. Other commenters assign folks a value based on helpfulness and other attributes and if that value drops low enough, then they simply don’t get seen. On a technical level, I think you’re going to like how it nests comment threads–I’m already really liking the format there.
Roll to Disbelieve has never had a whole lot of problem commenters; it’s actually pretty rare for us to have any trouble around here. That may be why this blog was selected, who knows. But as it gets more and more popular (as indeed it is; my pageviews are double to triple what they were on a good month on WordPress), we’re going to face more and more of those sorts of issues.
I don’t know exactly how well it’ll work once we get it in place, but I’m very willing to try it out and hope you will be willing to dive in with me. I know, too, that I’m asking a lot of y’all after we already leaped from WordPress to Patheos’ Disqus system so recently, but this system has the potential to make your Patheos experience a lot less stressful and a lot more enjoyable.
For a while, there’ll be two tabs on post comments – one for Disqus, one for World Table. You’ll be able to switch back and forth and comment in either place. As always, if you see a comment that is offensive or that otherwise violates this blog’s commenting policies in either tab, please report it.
See you soon; we’ll be talking about Hell tomorrow.