Order articles by dates of their most recent comments?

[rjon]

Hi John,

Is there a way for the articles listed in the Main Page center column to be ordered by the date of the most recent comment made to each article, rather than the articles' original posting dates?

Even in our testing phase, we already have so many comments to our site that they often quickly fall off the bottom of the "Recent Comments" component (even after customizing it to show 10 items instead of the default 5).

I'm concerned about this because we'll be inviting a focus group of ~100 new users onto our site in a couple of weeks. And many of their comments will likely be posted to older but still active articles that would have already fallen off the bottom of the Main Page's center column. In these cases newly posted comments would be essentially invisible for folks who logon less than several times a day.

I think our readers will miss fewer of those new comments if the articles with the most recent comments showed up at the top of the Main Page. (Most of our users will be enabled only to comment, so we'll likely have many more new comments than new articles.)

I know we can partly compensate for this with email notifications, but there may be so many comments then that we'd want to disable comment notifications so as not to swamp our users' email.

~ ron
Admin, SCIY

[john]

Is there a way for the articles listed in the Main Page center column to be ordered by the date of the most recent comment made to each article, rather than the articles' original posting dates?

There is no way to sort articles like that...

I understand your issue here, but I don't quite have a suggestion at this time... If I can think of anything which might benefit you in this case, I'll post back here.

[rjon]

Thanks for thinking about this John. Looking forward to seeing what you may (hopefully) come up with.

As I think you see, this is quite an important issue for us. I'm surprised it hasn't come up before for other blogs that have lots of comments.

~ ron

[john]

Thanks for thinking about this John. Looking forward to seeing what you may (hopefully) come up with.

You're welcome, but I don't foresee coming up with what you are looking for unfortunately.

As I think you see, this is quite an important issue for us. I'm surprised it hasn't come up before for other blogs that have lots of comments.

We have a number of blogs with strong community, and at least one which has received more than 300 comments on multiple articles in a single day...

I think what you will find in practice is that your regular readers will tend to comment on only the most recent articles, and if they care to be informed of subsequent comments on a particular thread they will elect to receive comment notifications on a thread. Older articles rarely receive comments, and are unlikely to provoke discusssions. It's the new stuff that draws attention, and is more likely to be perceived as "comment-worthy" by your readers...

[rjon]

> more than 300 comments on multiple articles in a single day...

Wow; ok, if they can handle that many comments, then we'll find a way.

I'm sure you're right that most of the comments on blogs are in response to recently posted articles. I've been thinking of BH in terms of the conferencing systems that I've worked with (like the WELL), which I'm now seeing is probably an inappropriate comparison.

~ ron

[john]

I've been thinking of BH in terms of the conferencing systems that I've worked with (like the WELL), which I'm now seeing is probably an inappropriate comparison.

That's an excellent insight, and one I would be very much in agreement with. At their most basic levels, blogs are about one-to-many communications and forums or conferencing systems are about many-to-many communications. A blog is your pulpit, or your groups pulpit; it's where you publish. You are the only one who can start a conversation. On a forum, anyone can start a conversation... There are uses for both types of communication. But you are right: while there are similarities, and there are some blogging systems that have more conferencing elements built into them, blogs and conferencing systems have distinct differences.

While commenting is an optional element of blogging, the best place to comment on something you see on someone else's blog is on your own blog... In a sense, the blogosphere itself is one big conferencing system. The methods used to track these distributed conversations are still very primitive, but as the tools develop it will become more obvious that blogs are nodes in a distributed conferencing system.