Comment System?

[Arkane 270]

I was wondering if how the comment system on Pny FM would be like? Would it be like youtube, soundcloud, facebook or something completely different?

[Twilight Sparkle ✨ 8,528]

I was wondering if how the comment system on Pny FM would be like? Would it be like youtube, soundcloud, facebook or something completely different?

 

Of those three, it'll be closest to YouTube's style. The comment system is modeled mostly off of deviantART's, but is a bit more basic at this time - features like images, emoticons, and threading are not priorities for the alpha version of the site.

 

Each track and album has a paginated comment section, currently set to separate comments in blocks of up to 100 at a time. Only site staff have the ability to moderate comments (ie. hide and unhide them) at this time, and they disappear from view completely when they are hidden.

 

I've weighed the possibility of allowing artists to moderate their own comments, but a balance needs to be struck between letting artists have their own space and allowing a much larger community to flourish. FanFiction.net, for example, has grown pretty large without giving authors much control over reviews of their stories, and this makes some reviewers feel safe knowing that their comments won't be removed by a spiteful author (of course, this in no way grants anyone a license to be rude and abusive in comments).

 

I'd welcome any feedback on this matter. It's not a particularly difficult permission to change either way.

[Arkane 270]

I think adding a character limit would help lessen the spam? Because, personal preference, I would rather have some sort of good constructive criticism rather than just a single phrase or word. Or maybe that would be too strict. Iunno. :I

[Crystal Skull 53]

Will there be like a program where it can tell if someone's advertising? Because all of the comments may become people trying to get more people on their youtube channel and stuff.

[Twilight Sparkle ✨ 8,528]

I think adding a character limit would help lessen the spam? Because, personal preference, I would rather have some sort of good constructive criticism rather than just a single phrase or word. Or maybe that would be too strict. Iunno. :I

 

A character minimum, you mean?

 

Pony.fm is meant to be a very different type of community than MLP Forums... much more user-driven than staff-driven, if you know what I mean. So, I don't think that implementing a character minimum on it for comments would really be appropriate, as Pony.fm is built around its members' music rather than centralized discussion threads. I expect the vast majority of users would simply find a character minimum annoying rather than particularly productive, and it won't turn listeners who can't tell a half note from a quarter rest into professional music reviewers.

 

Asking for critique in the track description would, I think, be a more effective thing to do. I could look into implementing a "critique" feature akin to deviantART's, where an artist can set a flag on a piece to "request critique", which displays a huge and very prominent "This artist has requested critique on this work." message on the deviation page. With dA's system, critiques get a somewhat meatier editor and are displayed separately from comments, giving them both more prominence and permanence.

 

What are your thoughts on that? Is asking for critique in the track description enough, or would you prefer a full-blown critique system?

 

 

Will there be like a program where it can tell if someone's advertising? Because all of the comments may become people trying to get more people on their youtube channel and stuff.

 

There are no plans for an automated means of detecting advertising in comments. The complexity of developing an algorithm to detect that automatically is... mind-bending, to say the least.

 

But now that you bring it up, it's certainly possible that people will (mis)use the comment system to try and get more attention for themselves, as much as I hope that it will be used to discuss the actual piece of music they're commenting on. To that end, there will be a report system to make moderators aware of such behaviour and allow the offending comments to be swiftly removed.

 

Going back to my first post in this topic, it's also worth considering the option of giving artists the ability to moderate their tracks' comments themselves. You could then clean up that kind of stuff on your own when you run across it. However, there's certainly something to be said about letting moderators deal with it so that recurringly troublesome community members can be tracked and dealt with.