I cannot comment on comments. This ails me.

I wonder... if i could open a blog post that was automatically a comment on Jonathan's comment (autoembed a link and an option to autoquote as i compose, perhaps) would i be happy? For some kinds of counterpoint it would be perfect, but if my blog was mostly about X and he was talking about Y, my preference would be to comment near his comment.

Maybe right here... but with an @Jonathan Powers convention - Hi!

"Tweets" within comments.

I think simple backchannel comments -- like the nicely designed InMail at LinkedIn or Flickr mail at Flickr -- would really help people connect and permit one of the things the Salon Letters community has never had... the ability to "whisper" or pass notes in the back of the classroom, as it were, without exposing an email address to spammers.

@Gail Williams :)

When dealing with a handful of comments, the @ convention works great. When dealing with dozens, or even hundreds--as often happens with most of Salon's major columnists--untangling the multiple conversations becomes worse than tedious. An optimal solution, I would argue, would allow for simple threading and filtering. But really, any kind of threading system would be better than the circa 1994 system that Salon currently uses.

If I understand it correctly, I'm not sure if the complexity of your autoembedding idea is worth the trouble I suspect it would take to implement it. Followable counterpoint is pretty easily achieved by threaded responses cross posted on one's own blog. Cut and paste.

Re backchannel comments: Awesome idea! Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes! And the metaphor of the whisper channel is painfully apt.

May I third the notion of enabling backchannel comments? I believe it would facilitate connection and community.

I somehow deleted my last post before it posted. Anyway, my problem concerns posting photos. Is there any way that Open Salon could auto-size photos so that the width is maximized to fill the width of the post?

I post lots of photos now, and they're always tiny, unless I use an external host. When I use an external host it seems I have to re-size my pic to app. 4.75" wide 72 dpi to get it to fit across my post (without being cropped). And I don't really want my pics to lead to my external photo account. It presents quite a conundrum.

I'm not sure if this thread is dead but I"ll second commenting on comments and the need for advanced editing features. Sure it's possible to churn out your html in an external WYSIWYG editor and then cut and paste (which is what I've been doing) , but if WordPress can manage this I'm sure oOS can too.

Also, it would be excellent to get a notification when someone comments on your comment if that feature if ever implemented.
In lieu of that it would also be good if there was somewhere that you could keep track of the comments left.

Thanks

You need to make an, "edit" feature on comments. It would be nice to be able to edit out the bad words without deleting the whole post.

When I tell the system to "remember my password" it NEVER does. When I add a friend the default is to return to MY blog rather than the new friend's blog thereby meaning I have to remember to make comments first or be willing to go back 2 pages if I want to comment or read other articles.

Maybe its something I'm doing wrong, but whenever someone notifies me of a new entry, it's never hyperlinked. I always have to cut and paste.

This is from my blog post on OS. My chief problem is that I find it very hard to identify posts I want to read in the sea of stuff I have no interest in. OS is like a magazine that offers joking articles about aging prostrates to the same audience as serious articles aimed at tweens buying their first bra.

If find searching by topic frustrating.

Suggestions, ala Amazon, that other people who rated this post also rated these other posts. That would bring other interesting posts to my attention.

A way to edit my profile to highlight certain key words, avoid others. Autism is a topic that interests me, I have no desire to read another post about anti-semitism. I don’t appreciate poetry. Let me click on a box after I’ve read the post to help define my interests.

I’d remember to rate more posts if the box to rate was on the bottom. That would also ensure that no one rates a post before reading it.

I’d like to be able to see recent posts by my “friends.” Recent doesn’t mean the last one they’ve written, it means anything written in the last few days or week (a box I can click depending on when I last visited.)

I’d also like to be able to define people whose posts I have no interest in reading. I think there’d be less abuse of Dr. Amy if people who can’t stand her could choose to never see her posts.

The term ‘friend’ is silly. I noted that when Shell was a sponsor, you could become a ‘fan’ of Shell, but not a friend. Why can’t the rest of us have a term that suggests the real story -- a one way street? Regular reader/preferred writer might be good terms.

I don’t want a closed shop. I want a way to identify new posts, new writers who might interest me. But I don’t want to wade through stuff I have no interest in to find it.

The bottom line is, Open Salon can’t continue to be all things to all people and still be a satisfying place to blog and read blogs. We need to be able to customize what we see. There’s great writing here; I’d like to find more of it. There may be great poems and great advice on prostrate problems, but I’d like to avoid them.