A big tweak to Projects: new comments going public
The original (and still to this day) plan for the Projects section was to let members here show off their amazing works. There's a great deal of creative people here and it was tough to figure out a good way to share new projects with other members, so we built Projects along the lines of the previous mailing list setup by kindall.
Originally, I saw Projects as being a great launching board for new MetaFilter posts. I envisioned maybe half the posts to Projects ending on MetaFilter, and with that in mind, I didn't want to discourage people from "promoting" posts up to MetaFilter proper by having lengthy discussions already on Projects. I thought it'd act as a nice incentive to not have comments at all, to save those comments for when the best stuff ends up at MeFi.
After a few years of doing Projects, I've realized almost all the projects posted are quite new, and mostly not yet ready for MeFi (half the time I think "this would make a great post in six months when there is more content here") but they're still cool works. After Projects launched with no comments at all, we eventually added private comments to the creator, and though that was weird, I felt it enabled people to share their feedback, bugs, etc with the creator.
People have long asked why the comments were private, and I stuck to the original notion that I didn't want to have two discussions about the same thing in two places on mefi -- that it'd be better to leave the incentive to push stuff to MeFi and discuss it there. I'll concede that the original plans for how I thought Projects would grow and be used here are different than what happens on the site day to day. Most projects are new, and only 1 or 2 get promoted up to MeFi each month.
With that in mind, we're going to flip the switch today on new comments, making every new comment public, while keeping the old system in place as-is. All previous comments on the Projects site are still private and open to the creators to read, but you can no longer leave a private comment for a Projects post. Every Projects thread will get a standard comment thread like the ones everywhere else on the site, with full functionality like favorites, flagging, preview, and HTML shortcuts.
This will go live later today, and we've kept the new projects posting page closed for a week while we retooled the system and allowed the last few projects to get their share of private feedback before flipping the switch on new public feedback.
This is a long time coming and I admit the no comments then private comments thing was a weird design choice, especially considering the way comments are handled everywhere else on the site, so the new way of doing things should work out much better since it'll be in line with what members expect. I suppose this will create the two-discussions problem I tried to avoid in the first place, but I suspect it only affects a small handful of posts and people on MeFi could link to the existing discussion to say "hey, don't forget the 10 comments over there about this as well" (or we could automate that when you make a mefi post about a projects post in the future)
Subscribe
posted by cortex at 10:16 AM on May 27, 2008