MSP / PnF COMMENT FEATURE Q&A

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David J Weston
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MSP / PnF COMMENT FEATURE Q&A

Postby David J Weston » Mon May 15, 2017 8:32 pm

Thank you to various of our testers who have asked the following questions during testing. We hope these answers will deal with many of the queries users have. No doubt there will be a lot of them. We may have to allow time before we can provide full answers to them all, so in the meanwhile, please ask a moderator about anything not listed below. If they do not know the answers, they will contact David or Alias Al.

It is important to realise that the developers see the MSP / PnF comment feature as a BEGINNING on which to build once the users have let them know what they want, so that the developers do not progress to a point where things are not easily changed before you have been able to tell them what you think.

Q. If I ban someone from commenting, can I unban them?
A. Not yet. A feature will be provided a.s.a.p. In the meanwhile, if you want to unban someone, contact a moderator with your link and the link of the banned user. They will get David to do the unbanning.

Q. How do I get rid of the inappropriate comments made by someone I have banned?
A. Ban first, then delete. The delete button will get rid of their comments one at a time. If you also use the ‘edit friends’ page to block them, you will not only remove their comments from your own page, you and they will not be able to read one another’s comments anywhere in the game. We will consider a ‘delete all comments on my page by a user’ feature when we look at unbanning – but we have never seen this done anywhere else, so we were not in a rush to be the first site we know of to do so.

Q. Why am I taken back up to the “Comment” Button when I post my reply, instead of staying where I can see my reply in situ?
A. This is the first generation of this software. To make everything stay still, we need to use a technology called AJAX. The first thing to do to use AJAX is to be sure that the non-AJAX version works. When we are sure that the comment feature has no bugs, we will create an AJAX version. If we do that before we are sure the comment feature works correctly, we would then have two versions to fix if anything went wrong. We will get there. This version of the software is the necessary first step in getting there. We need your opinions about it before we move on and make it harder to change things you do not like.

Q. Why do some of the comments on my page indent, but not others?
A. No ‘comments’ should indent. The things that indent are ‘replies’ to ‘comments’. A reply to a reply should indent more than a reply --- and so on. The Visual Guide will give examples.

Q. Why do I have a comment saying “this comment may not appear” on my page, and how can I see that comment?
A: That comment has either been deleted or removed for other reasons. This may have been done by the person who posted the comment, by the page owner or by admin. You should only see such a comment if there was a reply to it before it was deleted, and the replies have not been deleted. In that case the blank comment is retained to keep the indent structure correct and make it as clear as possible who replied to who.

Q. Why does the latest comment on my page appear at the top, but the latest reply to a comment appears at the bottom of the replies?
A. Comments are shown latest first, so you can easily spot new comments. Replies are shown in chronological order, so that they make sense, as they are replying to something that was said before them. We will consider an option to view comments earliest first – but usually people want to see the latest comment, whereas replies to comments must be kept in order to show who replied to whom.

Q. I accidentally deleted someone else’s comment on my page. Can I get it back, because I didn’t read it yet and/or I don’t remember who wrote it?
A. I am sorry, no. We have installed a confirmation alert to give you the chance to think twice. Any more than that and it gets burdensome to delete comments. Extra facilities for undeleting would mean a lot more software and more buttons to click to get at deleted comments, which is more to confuse the user. There has to be some responsibility on the user to read the alert.

Q. I want to leave a message on someone’s page, but I keep getting this error message: “MSP error message: The thread you required does not exist, or you are banned from it.”
A: This is equivalent to ‘Skeezle’. Not all users want all other users to read things all of the time. Users can set the privacy of a slide lower than the privacy of their page. Then if you follow a link to the slide, you may see it, but the ‘page’ tab may deny you access. This is the user’s prerogative. The alternative would be for users to have one setting and not to be able to make a few slides public without making the rest of their page public. We give total control to the users, and sometimes they will use this to deny content to other users.

Q. Will it be possible to get a notification when someone posts on our pages or replies to comments?
A. We want to do this as soon as possible. But first we want to ensure the rest of the comment feature is fully working. If we start work on notifications and find ourselves having to fix the comment feature at the same time, we will end up in a huge mess.

Q. When the new comment feature is introduced, will we lose the earlier comments made on our slides using the FB comment feature? If so: “How can I find the comments made on my previous slides using the old FB comment feature?”
A. Sadly yes. We have been warning the users that the FB comment feature will be replaced for a year wherever that feature appears. We have also issued other warnings for four years. It is a pity it has taken us this long to replace the FB comment feature, but there is no alternative. It is unreliable, it is impossible to guarantee that their software will continue to work with ours, and at present the FB comment feature is crippling our page design. We cannot even guarantee that FB will continue to provide it in its current form. We can never make it link to pages in-game or use it for in-game notifications --- the list is endless.

Until we are sure our own systems are fully reliable we will enable the users to switch between our comment system and the FB comment system using links on the Directory page, the My Pets page and the Single Slide page. If anyone wants to copy their comments across from one to another, that is the most we can do to help as we have no access to FB comments other than our eyes. We ask FB to put comments on a page and they do so. The page is a three-way dance between our server, FB’s servers and your browser; we have no access to FB comments and we never can have. Neither can we moderate or delete FB comments or enable you to do so on your own page. These things are impossible. So after a grace period, the FB comment feature has to go. We truly regret lost content – we began by enabling users to rescue their fluff content and we hate to lose anything - but given our minimal programming resources, it has taken us four years to get round to this sadly essential step. The big plus is that in future, we can take total responsibility for your content and you will never lose a comment facility in the way that fluff did in its last months.


Q. How are the dates and times of posting and editing comments and replies set up and why don’t they have the exact date and time?
A. They are ‘ago’ timing until one day has passed. Currently they are universal time (GMT). We will be glad to give the users options and consult about what the options should be. We prefer to do the simplest thing first, then let you all have your say, rather than guess what you want, do the wrong thing and then put it right later. This and all aspects of the comment feature are up for discussion – and because for the first time we are in charge of the comment feature in use, for the first time we can ask you what you want and then provide it, given time. Before we had no options at all and content could change appearance without us being able to do anything about it or even have any advance warning. That era of powerlessness ends now.

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