Better comments in MT

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Damelon has documented his journey to improve comments on his MT-driven weblog.

On the path to the ideal comment system, weblogs are missing one basic feature of classical discussions/forums systems: be notified when someone has replied to one of your comments, or simply added a new comment to a post. That would facilitate everybody's life and encourage discussions, otherwise you are required to check posts on a regular basis to find out if there is (or not) a discussion going up.

So I'm going to invoke the lazyweb for a "MTNotify" plug-in that would:

  • allow me to subscribe to a particular post and be notified by email when a comment or a TrackBack has been added to it
  • on weblogs that allows for threaded comments, allow me to be notified when someone replies to a comment of mine

Perl and MT gurus, please! ;-)

P.S. the first action could be done through RSS but I find it very impractical. Just subscribe to Joi Ito RSS+comments feed to see what I mean. You get notified by your aggregator when Joi's posts change but have no quick way to decipher what's new (a post update, a new comment, a TB? You have to re-read the entire post and comments to find that out). I'd much prefer an email that reads "someone has replied to your comment at..." with all the beef and a quick link inside.