Thoughts on Trac wiki page commenting facility
Something Robert raised during the meetings at C++ Now was why can't people comment on Boost's Trac wiki pages? The simple answer is because Trac doesn't allow it and hasn't got to implementing it in many years (http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/11676) despite it being technically as simple as appending a ticket's comments to a wiki page, so I spent some time researching what options are available: 1. https://trac-hacks.org/wiki/WikiCommentsPlugin This works by inserting the comments directly into the article text. Pros: The comments are the document. This lets the page author fix the problem and delete the comment where that is appropriate. Cons: You need a trac login and editing privs to comment, which until a Trac 1.0 upgrade remains manually awarded by a Boost admin. No preview, so you need to know Trac wiki markup. 2. Disqus https://disqus.com/ This is the grand daddy of free commenting services. This works by you inserting some Javascript into the page where you want the comments to appear. AJAX does the rest. This could very easily patched into Trac for every wiki page by tweaking its template as per the instructions at http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracInterfaceCustomization. Pros: Very well understood by users, in fact by everyone. Built in excellent spam protection. Nice UI. Just works. I also have a ton of ready to go infrastructure from nedprod.com for Disqus, so it's really very little effort for me to integrate this. Cons: They own all your data. They serve adverts in the comment stream, though apparently you can now opt out. They track user visits and sell the information, so AdBlock and Ghostery default block Disqus. Comment load times can be very slow. Comments aren't indexed by Google, and this may decrease the value of the system. 3. Keep looking Niall! Like none of the above? There are open source clones of Disqus you can host on your own infrastructure, but I have no experience with any of the those. If the community really doesn't like either of the two above, I guess I can keep looking. Niall -- ned Productions Limited Consulting http://www.nedproductions.biz/ http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/
On Sat, May 30, 2015 at 7:48 PM, Niall Douglas <s_sourceforge@nedprod.com> wrote:
Something Robert raised during the meetings at C++ Now was why can't people comment on Boost's Trac wiki pages? The simple answer is because Trac doesn't allow it and hasn't got to implementing it in many years (http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/11676) despite it being technically as simple as appending a ticket's comments to a wiki page, so I spent some time researching what options are available:
3. Keep looking Niall!
Like none of the above? There are open source clones of Disqus you can host on your own infrastructure, but I have no experience with any of the those. If the community really doesn't like either of the two above, I guess I can keep looking.
4. Move the wiki to something like Wordpress or Drupal (etc) which has built-in support for commenting. And along the way integrate the wiki and the website into one site for easier management, cross-referencing, and community involvement. -- -- Rene Rivera -- Grafik - Don't Assume Anything -- Robot Dreams - http://robot-dreams.net -- rrivera/acm.org (msn) - grafikrobot/aim,yahoo,skype,efnet,gmail
On 31.05.2015, at 03:06, Rene Rivera <grafikrobot@gmail.com> wrote:
4. Move the wiki to something like Wordpress or Drupal (etc) which has built-in support for commenting. And along the way integrate the wiki and the website into one site for easier management, cross-referencing, and community involvement.
Makes sense. However, is there really a need for comments on the wiki? On most websites where this is possible the comments usually are either spam or sitting there for years without resulting in anything. Now, having comments on Github, that would be something...
On 31 May 2015 at 9:18, Thomas Trummer wrote:
4. Move the wiki to something like Wordpress or Drupal (etc) which has built-in support for commenting. And along the way integrate the wiki and the website into one site for easier management, cross-referencing, and community involvement.
Makes sense. However, is there really a need for comments on the wiki?
I'm expecting https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/BestPracticeHandbook to be riddled with errors, and I am looking for some method for people to easily correct my mistakes.
On most websites where this is possible the comments usually are either spam or sitting there for years without resulting in anything.
The first option I presented requires a trac login, so that should prevent spam. The second option has excellent automated spam removal.
Now, having comments on Github, that would be something...
Github internally does pull requests as opening an issue, and therefore commenting on the pull request diff works. Without a pull request, it has no way of storing and tracking comments on code over time, at least not in a way exposable to git. Michael Caisse is looking into Atlassian for Boost, and I believe that has a code commenting tool. Niall -- ned Productions Limited Consulting http://www.nedproductions.biz/ http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/
On 30 May 2015 at 20:06, Rene Rivera wrote:
4. Move the wiki to something like Wordpress or Drupal (etc) which has built-in support for commenting. And along the way integrate the wiki and the website into one site for easier management, cross-referencing, and community involvement.
Michael Caisse has volunteered to look into options for a complete revamp of the Boost main website, with deep integration of all the other Boost assets into a single unified web presence. I would expect even a report on possible options to be many months away, and any deployment of a solution up to a year away at least. He mentioned doing some django custom web service programming, so this is a lot of work. I've just volunteered to look into upgrading Trac from v0.12 to v1.0 which if possible or successful would gain github integration, so Trac would become reasonably well aware of github including logins, source commits, and issues. Just the ability to login with your github account I think would be enormously useful. Regarding Drupal or Wordpress as choices, both have poor to terrible maintenance costs and would require very substantially increased workload from the web team. Trac has the huge advantage of being exceptionally low maintenance, indeed we've been on an unpatched not upgraded ancient version for years now, and no security problems. Niall -- ned Productions Limited Consulting http://www.nedproductions.biz/ http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/
On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 3:06 AM, Rene Rivera <grafikrobot@gmail.com> wrote:
4. Move the wiki to something like Wordpress or Drupal (etc) which has built-in support for commenting. And along the way integrate the wiki and the website into one site for easier management, cross-referencing, and community involvement.
In the same kind of alternatives but maybe better, a lot of blogs and websites are starting to use Discourse [1] (a mordern approach to "forums", by stackoverflow team) as a commenting system, wherever is the comment (blog page, static page, etc). Pros: Discourse have a _very_ modern interface based on usability instead of fancy-ness. It makes it intuitive to use. It is also easy to install on a server if you can use docker. Others have used it as comment system and it helps getting side discussions outside comments (because discussions can be split, with discussion origin tracking). It's open source[3]. There is a plugin in wordpress and other similar cms to integrate it.[2] It's a less problematic comment system than disqs (which I used for some years but found the exprience very negative). Discourse plays well with mobile. Cons: It uses ruby on the server. As a full discussion board, it might fragment the discussions between the mailing lists and the comments system. There might be other issues that I'm not aware of, I used it for a year before it went 1.0 and was surprisingly happy with it but I never tried to use it for comments. The installation was not trivial at the time, comparable to installing a TRAC instance. I didn't try the docker version yet. Also, it's a young technology even if well design, it still means it could have issues unknown yet. Some websites using it as comment system: - discourse's team lead's blog: http://blog.codinghorror.com/ - http://www.sitepoint.com/farewell-disqus-hello-discourse/ There are others but that should be enough to see it. How to embedd it in static sites: http://eviltrout.com/2014/01/22/embedding-discourse.html [1] http://www.discourse.org/ [2] https://github.com/discourse/wp-discourse and maybe others [3] https://github.com/discourse/discourse
participants (4)
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Klaim - Joël Lamotte -
Niall Douglas -
Rene Rivera -
Thomas Trummer