To Comment or Not to Comment

So most of you noticed that I turned off comments. Some of you thought this was a good idea; some of you didn’t. I agreed with both sides. But the truth is, I miss the comments. I miss seeing 46 replies to a post, regardless of how retardedly negative many of them could be. Posting without comments feels like sending messages in a bottle to outer space.

Empty. Cold. Lonely.

Melodrama aside, I have now turned comments back on. The only catch: registration is required. This is just a little hurdle I’ve placed to discourage drive-by haters. For those of who have faithfully contributed constructive criticism, I apologize for this annoying addition.

You can register yourself here, or you can just follow the registration links whenever you decide to comment on a post.

Thank you all for reading Motionographer and for your continued support. We really are here for you, the readers. We really do care about creating positive enthusiasm about outstanding work. Please keep coming back, and send suggestions for improvements to feedback@motionographer.com. Thanks.

About the author

Justin Cone

/ justincone.com
Together with Carlos El Asmar, Justin co-founded Motionographer, F5 and The Motion Awards. He currently lives in Austin, Texas with is wife, son and fluffball of a dog. Before taking on Motionographer full-time, Justin worked in various capacities at Psyop, NBC-Universal, Apple, Adobe and SCAD.

20 Comments

del_razor

I think this is the best solution to the issue of people piggybacking without really being constructive toward topics..

also.. just a suggestion / question..

might there be a way to setup a section for comments on the quickies? I know that sort of negates the whole reason for calling them “quickies” but there have been a few times where i had additional information or comment or question about one of them and had no way to ask or make known my thoughts..

just a suggestion mind you..

keep up the good work :)

ebeaz

Comments are great because it gives students keen insight into what technical aspects of motion graphics are important in the industry.

AvailMedia

I love this site. I came across it one day a month or two ago from a post on newstoday or mograph or something. It’s my homepage now. The fact that there are comments makes it even better! Gotta keep up with the industry… and hopefully lead it every once in a while.

KGB

Ahh….much better with comments :-)

D-Tox

I like the idea of having to sign up.

I have always enjoyed scrolling through peoples critiques just to get other people’s perspectives on different projects. Although it gets hard when some people don’t seem to have any idea what they are talking about and just start bashing things left and right. Hopefully this will help because this site is defiantly a good insight. (it is my homepage after all)

Keep up the good work! :)

rima

^^^
like KGB sayz…always…

Supernumerario

Hello again! =) Live is better with interactivity ^^

oyvindronning

Ohoy!

This wasn’t too bad:)
Keep it up!

Simon Robson

OK, so i think in the 21st century life is all about sifting through the non-desirable to find the desirable. In as much, sifting through abusive / ignorant comments to find the patches of genuine insight is fine. It’s what i expect to have to do every time i leave my house. So, two thumbs up to bringing back comments! And keep up the good work. Simon

sismo

I like the Feedback, more than when is for a Great site like this.

mrjourney

Perhaps the commenting system could be further tweaked by adding a Slashdot-like rating system for comments (“-1 troll” or “+1 constructive,” etc) and a corresponding filter system to allow people to filter comments below a certain, user-set threshold. In this way, we’ll only see comments with positive or neutral ratings, or negative to that threshold. Anything less than, say, -2 will get filtered out and be replaced with a “this comment by TrollManX was filtered because it was under your threshold” message, with a link to the comment just in case you still want to read it.

This system seems to be an effective way to weed out the trolls and non-constructive posters, especially with such a vibrant and active community.

Joe Clay

Thank you for bringing back comments. It started to get lonely on our end too. I’m glad you decided to set up a registration system, actually.

Please don’t add a rating system, they just get in the way and are too available to people who want to mess things up anyway. In addition, they always look horrible because no one has designed one well, and they just make it more difficult to navigate. The only thing I would change is fixing the numbering of comments and possibly adding a lookup to gravatar.

I’m not sure how we could have benefitted from not being able to comment. If a comment is bad, it’s easy to just ignore it, even if it starts a flame war.

Joe Clay

You might also want to add an editing system :) But that can also make the code bulky, so I’d understand if you didn’t :)

kwilso

yea… my only hope would be that a rating system would filter out comments like the one ‘mrjourney’ wrote.

ochyming

I think no comment is actually negative.

Van Gogh would have said that.

krozm

I would have to agree with mrjourney.

I think having a polling system works well (as seen on digg, etc) as it filters out the constructive from the destructive.

However I can’t imagine it would be super easy to implement, unless there’s a module for it.

Glad the comment system is back though, three thumbs up for that.

Joe Clay

Digg is exactly what I’d try to avoid. It’s horrendous.

tinapinxit

I missed the comments! It just didn’t feel right without them..

scm

thanks for bringing back the comments. As a person who dabbles in motion graphics I find that I can use a lot of the constructive comments in my own work. Love the site… thanks again.

Allan W.

Nice to see comments back on. They’re worth it, for good or ill.

Consider some kind of indicator at the top of pages to denote log status (like, “welcome, ” or “logged in as “). Should be easy, though I don’t know the WP way.

Oh, and Gravatars look good, too.

Comments are closed.