Reply To: Proliferation?

[belbear42]

Rezwan wrote:
This raises another issue for me – comments vs. forum. We have both capabilities. But they don’t really dovetail. The comments link will take you down the same page to where comments start. “Discuss in forums” will bring you here to the forums.

Comments are more limited. They only follow a specific article. On the forums, you can initiate topics independently. Also, forums gives you more flexibility for quoting, going back and editing, uploading images and so forth.

There is another important difference between comments and forums:

In the forums you can immediately see where new replies have been posted (the dark folder icons), so even if you post in a “dormant” thread, discussions can quickly pick up again.

Comments do not have this very useful signaling feature, so comments on somewhat older articles are probably never looked at again, because every regular visitor has already read the article and doesn’t bother to re-read. Passers-by don’t have a login, they don’t write at all.

And no, there isn’t a delete button I found. There is an edit button, but even in edit mode you can’t delete an already posted reply.