Could we allow comments to be posted on music.metafilter.com by Ajax?

December 7, 2014 6:47 PM

I was listening to a piece of music on MeFi Music and posted a comment. It was great that it asked me first if I really wanted to leave the page, but it occurs to me that you could also set it up so that the comment is posted by Ajax instead so you never leave the page. Last time we had this brought up was Nov 2012 and in the context of long threads rather than threads where posting actively interrupts a listening experience.

I realize this is yet another obnoxious thing to code into the website but it seems like being able to hold a discussion while listening to a piece of audio would be a very useful feature. It could also be made available on the PodCast MeTa pages, so that you could be listening to the podcast on the page and comment without having to open the same page in another tab.

posted by Deathalicious to Feature Requests at 6:47 PM (12 comments total)

I like the idea on the face of it, but have no idea to what extent it's a practical thing to implement, so I'm gonna leave that to Matt and pb to answer to. That it would implicitly be a different comment pipeline workflow from what we have everywhere else on the site might make it more of an issue than just the question of technical implementation of an AJAX-y comment workflow in a vacuum raises.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:48 PM on December 7, 2014

(Also on the more practical side, there's a lot of stuff already on the To Do list so this is unlikely to be something that would be done soon if it were to be done at all.)
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:51 PM on December 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

Sometimes I've wanted to comment while something is playing so I open a new tab and browse to the same page. It's not as handy as staying on the same page would be, but you can work around the limitation with some creative browser work.
posted by pb (staff) at 6:53 PM on December 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

One solution that would take a bit less finesse is just setting the target of the form to "_blank". So if you tried to post while sound was playing it would pop up a notice like "If you post this form it will open a new tab so that you audio will not be interrupted. Is this okay?" Something like that.
posted by Deathalicious at 7:02 PM on December 7, 2014

Yeah, target _blank would work but that feels pretty clunky. Commenting is so central to MetaFilter that we're very hesitant to alter how it works. The system is extremely simple: hit post, reload page, get all comments including the new one. There are definitely newer ways to accept comments, but the process of reloading the page is a strong part of the way you know your comment has been posted. Firing off a comment into a new tab would work, but you'd lose that normal part of the feedback. Did it post? Which tab do I go to now? I think it introduces some potential for confusion into the process.
posted by pb (staff) at 7:17 PM on December 7, 2014 [5 favorites]

An approach that fits into the existing interaction model might be to capture the player's location when you hit Post Comment so that you can include it in a querystring in the redirect. The player could then detect the presence of that querystring value and jump to that location and start playing when it is found.
posted by feloniousmonk at 10:19 PM on December 7, 2014

Another workaround would be to command/shift/ctrl+click the post comment button after writing your comment, as that will pop up a new tab/window with "comment preview" and you can keep the player running while previewing and then posting your comment.
posted by kaytwo at 6:37 AM on December 8, 2014

People post comments on Music ??????!
posted by Wolfdog at 7:13 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

I thought the whole question/hesitancy about Fanfare at first was to discourage liveblogging anyway. If that's a thing you'd like to discourage it seems unlikely you'd want to add a bunch of code to make it easier.
posted by bleep at 7:08 PM on December 8, 2014

I spent 15 seconds trying to work out who Ajax was in this context.

Carry on...
posted by BungaDunga at 1:24 PM on December 9, 2014

Well, we have the ajax-y new comments loading bits which is sort of half way towards solving the "get all comments including the new one" problem...

I think seeing the comment you just wrote right in front of you and perhaps some sort of "flash" notification saying your comment has been posted, plus a "scroll-to" comment would alleviate the issue of the standard feedback for commenting is a page refresh. Which, in and of itself, isn't the best messaging of the success of the event, although it has been the learned behavior since the get-go.

All that said, I like that metafilter is one of the few remaining sites that I can largely use from my handy, terminal based lynx without much trouble. I'd keep the old behavior as a fallback for those of us running 'scriptless.
posted by Freen at 8:31 PM on December 11, 2014

That said, the edit window feature adds a level of complexity as well.
posted by Freen at 8:33 PM on December 11, 2014