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[daniely]

i know we can get notifications for new comments but what do you guys think about having a way to view the latest comments from the website?

[practicingruby]

Some sort of activity stream would be nice, although I'm not sure what it'd look like. My main concern is that you wouldn't be able to get much context from reading the comments on their own, without referencing the article and the rest of the conversation. Do you have any thoughts on that?

[daniely]

i was thinking more along the lines of the github activity stream. here's a screenshot of the comments. it shows the "topic", user, truncated comment, and when it was posted. IMHO it's just the right amount of info.

[daniely]

as a user i wouldn't expect more context than what is shown above. my problem right now is that i don't have an easy way of finding the latest comments. i do get notification emails but i usually don't check them right away because they often come when i'm logged into my work github.

and new users wouldn't even have any emails to reference. it would also be a good exploratory tool for users just checking things out...say users that come to the site from a linked article

[practicingruby]

@daniely: All good points. What do you think of this idea, @jordanbyron?

[jordanbyron]

This is something we've kicked around a few times. I even recall it being slated for development right around the time when we were playing with "user profiles" which eventually just became github redirects - https://practicingruby.com/users/jordanbyron

User engagement could be a very powerful thing for Practicing Ruby, but I wonder if there are other systems that we already have in place which could be improved instead? For example, those comment notification emails are terrible. They should would work like GitHub's notification emails:

• Have the full content of the message in the body
• Allow users to directly reply to the message
• Include a link to the message itself

Currently Practicing Ruby fails to do any of those things. Personally I think we should fix the systems we already have in place before we start building new ones. As Canadian contractor and HGTV television star Mike Holmes would say:

If you're going to do something, do it right the first time!

[practicingruby]

I could do without reply-by-email, because it comes with plenty of complex pitfalls. However, full text comments are something we really need to be doing, as are direct links to comments.

I only want to keep five confirmed improvements on our backlog, and I don't want to bump anything that's already there. But I think I'm going to create a new status for feature requests called "Acknowledged" that allows us to mark a ticket as something that was asked for by our subscribers, and something we'd like to work on if time permits.

This will allow us to keep a ticket open without committing to a timeline or prioritization on it.