New Message: Commenting is too difficult.

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A new message was posted:

Address: http://manila.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$1426

By: Matt Deatherage (frontier at gcsf.com)

Although the OU Band Alumni site has hundreds of members, few of them ever post anything - no discussion, no news items, nothing. These are not generally blog-savvy people, but when we ask in person what stops them from replying, the answer usually comes back as something like, "I tried once, but it was too confusing and I couldn't figure out how to do it."

Generally speaking, the problem stems from the requiement that you have to be both registered and logged in to comment. I'm /strongly/ in favor of that, don't get me wrong. The specific problem is that when you're /not/ logged in, the standard theme capabilities don't make it really easy to tell you how to do it.

Consider this page [1]. This is where you wind up if you click 'Discuss' on a home page news item, and that's fair. You get a discussion group topic view, and at the end of each item is a link labeled "Comment on this message" (that's what the preferences call an "image" link to the discussion group, but text is far clearer here).

So, if you're not logged in, like most people aren't, you click on that link, and you go here [2]. This is just a different view of the same page. At the bottom, the "comment" link is now missing, but I see "responses" to this message.

There is /no/ clear indication of what you must do to comment on the page, even though you got there by clicking a link explicitly designed to let you comment. /If you are logged in/, you get a form with plenty of room to type a response. If you are /not/ logged in, as most people browsing are not, there's nothing.

I tried replacing the text "Comment on this message" with a macro using (*whoAmI*) that would make it clearer, but I can't evaluate a macro in that context - Manila generates an "a href" tag around it, and it's just not evaluated properly.

[The (*whoAmI*) macro is difficult to use here anyway, because it always returns a full sentence, and therefore is hard to blend into existing text.)

In looking at the template for single message appearance, I think I want the (*responseForm*) macro to generate site-settable text that says something like, "You must register and log in to comment on messages" with the appropriate links for Register and Log In. I can't just use the (*membershipBox*) macro because it doesn't explain that you have to sign up or login /to post comments/, and that's the point we're not getting across to our members. (I thought about putting (*membershipBox*) in the site's navigation tree, but since I can't change the text it emits to fit into the width I want, that was a bad idea.)

The #1 complaint we have from this one site, designed to draw in people from all over the country, is that it's incredibly unclear how to participate. I've written a story [3] about it using macros like (*whoAmI*) and (*relativeLink*) to make it clearer, but I can't get this information exactly where it needs to be - where the response form would be if the viewer was logged in.

Help?

[1] http://oubandalumni.org/discuss/msgReader$247
[2] http://oubandalumni.org/discuss/msgReader$247?mode=day
[3] http://oubandalumni.org/howtopostcomments

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