Stap isi

19 October 2008

Comment everywhere

The Guardian has extended the functionality and improved the information design of its community features.

The site as a whole is exceptional – see the tagging scheme for aggregating related information, the RSS feeds for almost everything and the rich yet composed front page. If you’re building or evaluating content management systems, see how the Guardian’s web platform evolved for a valuable real world case study.

But here I want to focus on their implementation of user comments, profiles and clippings. It’s how I think a Council website should work!

• Comments are not restricted to blog posts. People can respond to multiple information types.
• A person’s contributions across all information types is aggregated and accessible from their user profile.

Registration and sign in

To access the Guardian’s community features, you must be registered and signed in. Registration is a simple form. User accounts are based on an email address and password. Once signed in, you can edit your profile.

Identity

The Guardian has chosen a simple range of fields that still offer enough opportunity to establish an identity. The fields are:

• Image
• About Me – free text
• Gender – Male, Female or Don’t display gender
• Date of Birth – Your age will be calculated and displayed. For security reasons, your actual date of birth will not be shown.
• Location
• Real Name
• Interests (eg music, eating out, current affairs)
• Web Page

None of these fields is mandatory.

The ‘image’ is simply a choice of a generic icon in a range of colours. This is a weak point. User uploaded images would better convey identity.

Council web services should look at maintaining this information in a separate machine-accessible module, to allow a single log in over multiple services. Many of these back-office services (hell, all of them!) are proprietary, so it’s not a trivial implementation.

Reputation

One of the biggest changes for our community […] is the introduction of user profiles. Everybody who leaves at least one comment on our site automatically gets a user profile, which is a historical aggregation of their public participation on the site.

For a long time, we and many other sites operated a content-driven model which meant that user comments were only associated with – and displayed alongside – a particular content item. The creation of user profiles reveals our growing community-driven approach, recognising that just as every guardian.co.uk author gets a contributor page in which their contributions are archived so that their participation can be explored across topics and over time, so should our users.

See Meg Pickard’s user profile as an example. You don’t need to be signed in to view users’ pages.

On a Council site, this page might collect contributions from a range of information and interaction types, including but not limited to Council blogs, photo galleries, video, community consultations and/or forums.

Over time, this rewards regular and constructive contributors as their reputation is built on a searchable, visible archive of contributions.

It also provides context to user comments. Is Joe Bloggs always pushing the same barrow? Does Jane Lane have a bee in her bonnet about barking dogs?

Your comments stand as a public record of your participation on the site: think Hansard, for commenters. — Guardian Community FAQ

Patterns and data portability

A single site-wide sign in and identity also means easy and consistent access for anyone who has ever posted a comment. You’d expect this would improve participation rates.

I looked for an RSS feed of user’s comments but wasn’t successful. This functionality would allow you to take your content away with you, perhaps publishing it on your own site.

Custom collate

The Guardian allows registered users to ‘clip’ stories, photo galleries and blog posts. Essentially it’s just bookmarking within the site.

On a government site, the paradigm might be ‘custom home page’ – allowing the constituent to create their own view on your data, choosing their own ‘quick links’.

Information design

See The Wire re-up: In praise of…the Bunk – for an example of a blog post with comments.

The author of the post is clearly identified with an avatar at the top of the piece. Staff and contributors to the Guardian who comment below the piece are highlighted by an icon within the comment thread.

The ‘recommend’ link allows those who don’t want to register or comment to add their weight behind a comment – anonymously, with little effort. Obviously you might consider adding the negative option, as many forums do. But the Guardian choose to highlight only the positive.

Comments that are out of bounds can be quickly reported (‘Report abuse’). Comments you might want to refer or respond to later can be ‘clipped’ (bookmarked).

The Guardian has chosen to display comments from first to last. Maybe it’s in the hope that the conversation as it unfolded will be read or at least scanned before an additional comment is added.

They’ve kept the spacing quite tight, perhaps with this in mind.

The comment form itself is also tightly drawn, with a clear link to their community standards (good phrase), plus four commonly-used formatting buttons and a word count. Username and avatar is displayed at top; a subtle visual cue to the user that their identity and reputation will be placed against the comment.

Flexibility

The Guardian now has the facility to enable comments on items that are not blog posts – such as news stories and photo galleries. Feedback is woven right into the fabric of the site, an important integration that Council sites must consider.

I suggested previously – the example of the ‘street parties’ page – that real experiences posted against Council information would benefit both Council and constituents.

But you’ll still want to be selective over where dialogue can occur.

Simply opening up comments on all articles would be inappropriate; it would blur boundaries, and cast all areas of the site as equally open to the same kind of debate. — inside.guardian.co.uk, 4 June 2008

Sometimes the opportunity for interaction is ubiquitous over websites, which takes away from its impact when most required.

Moderation

Have a look at the excellent Community FAQ and Community Standards and Participation Guidelines.

Of note is that comments are closed automatically after 7 days; this might not be appropriate on a government site where conversations can profit from longer cycles of participation.

The Guardian web team are themselves exemplars of staff interaction online. They’re quite open about their work and their approach to moderation, both in comment threads and on their Inside guardian.co.uk blog.

Screen shots

Technologies

As the Pluck logo appears on user profile pages, I’m assuming these tools are an integration of their SiteLife Social Media Suite with the Guardian’s own platform.

Other resources

Content + Commentary by Bond Art + Science is a good overview of current thinking on comment facilities.

Bang The Table have lots of real-world experience with moderation on government and community consultation projects. See:

• The ten golden rules of online participation and engagement
• They keep asking questions – what should I do?

— b3rn   blogging, comments, identity   Oct 19, 07:28 PM   #

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