Alicornutopia

An OOC area might work as a commenting area. A like button would be good too.

Kappa wrote:An OOC area might work as a commenting area.

mmmaybe? That sounds like a discussion area, and there's a reason I suggested a commenting area instead of that - I'm much more likely to do the latter than the former (I don't always have the spoons for public discussion even with people I know and am comfortable with) and I think that might be true of other people, too. And we do already have here for discussion.

If there is to be a comment area, the authors should be permitted to disallow it.

rockeye_stonetoe wrote:If there is to be a comment area, the authors should be permitted to disallow it.

+1, yeah. Also the like button, I expect turning that off to be wanted less often but still nonzero times.

I would enjoy a comments section. Useful for pointing out typos for one thing, as well as squeeing outrageously.

The problem with something like a like button is that you get into a race condition where people feel pressured to "like" everything; the nice thing about the separate comment threads here is that they're opt-in and the separation between story and discussion creates a little bit of friction/a barrier to entry so you're more encouraged to post only things meaningful enough to you to overcome this. I'd probably be in favor of a view counter like on these forums so you can tell people are reading things, but notmuch more. Maybe a once-per-thread kudos system like AO3, but even that makes me a little wary. Given the size of the community I'm also nervous about decentralizing discussion away from this forum.

Edit: Maggie said some of this while I was editing my original post.

Isn't most of the purpose of a comments section served by the Sandbox Discussions thread?

I feel like it would be a good thing if the glowfic constellation had an OOC discussion section of its very own, possibly integrated somehow with a comment-on-this-thread system. The Sandbox Discussions thread is beginning to get unwieldy; witness the number of times people have had to go "What? Which thread is that?" when someone says a thing.

The once-per-fic kudos system on AO3 drives me absolutely batty. Whenever I see "You have already left kudos here :)" I'm like "YES YOU FOOLS I WANT TO DO IT AGAIN." As a reader, never mind a writer, I don't want high barriers to entry in my commenting systems.

I think I have flipped my opinion and now disapprove of the idea of like buttons and comment pages.

If kudos and comments are anonymous, I think much of the pressure to like everything disappears.