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Comment on portions of a post

James_B

This is a suggestion to look at different ways of providing quick and sensible access to submit, interact with, and view new supplemental feedback about specific sections of other peoples' posts .

There are a number of ways this could work, and some sites already do things like this. For instance, questions and answers on Stack Exchange can receive mini-comments themselves. This would not be limited to entire posts, however, and would be easy to visually identify the section of a post a piece of feedback addresses. This could involve the ability to select sections of a post with mouse to leave simple feedback in a pop-up form that posts next to the section in the sidebar, or it could display using an info bubble, or some other solution.

Some solutions may require a great deal of surgery to a Discourse fork, more than some feature suggestions as it would be heavily tied in to a slew of other elements. Some considerations I can think of:

  • How to display it in a way that makes sense and adds to the environment?
  • How to display it in a way that does not add to the sense of being overwhelmed by in the learning environment?
  • Would it make sense to allow users to turn this off for viewing posts? Could that cause any negatively-impacting divides in participation somehow?
  • Would it make sense to allow users to make it so their post cannot receive this kind of feedback?

This could help posters gain insight into how their posts affect others, about constructive criticism from other users, and identify minor edits quickly as suggested by users.

This could help encourage lurking users to more readily engage in participation with new ways of interacting that are useful for different purposes, and could help users submit quick feedback that would otherwise be off-topic but not substantive enough for a topic split.

This could also help add value to data collection and use for improving future LCLs.

That's what I think, but more importantly:

What do you think?

natalie

You can click the voice balloon bubble (looks like this:) when you are replying to quote someone's post, and then edit down to whatever you'd like to specifically quote.

Discourse is designed to be mostly flat discussion, I think we're planning to stick with that to keep things simple...