I’ve been thinking a bit about commenting on blogs.

I’m sure most people who’ve spend an appreciable amount of time on the internet, and reading blogs, have found themselves responding to a blog post in the comments, and realising after the fifth paragraph that their epic riposte really doesn’t belong in a thread of comments, but as a separate-yet-linked piece of writing itself.

The question is, how to maintain the relationship between their new post, on their own blog, and the original inspiration for their response. “Trackback”, I hear you say! Sure, but that has become fodder for spammers, has it not?

Services like disqus also aim to tackle this to some extent, but I still feel like I ought to own my own opinions. Maybe some kind of spam-protected trackback is the way forward? Maybe this is already a solved problem. It’s quite possible.

Huh.

As an aside, this was inspired by my other post about RailsBizConf. I wanted to respond to Obie in more detail than the questionnaire’s text input for ‘other’ allowed, but believe with increasingly fervour that this, interblah.net, my own grand palace of thought-stuff and nonsense, should be the repository for my opinions. After all, where else can I revise my version of the truth with utter impunity?

I wouldn’t want Obie to think that, by making that post on my blog, I felt that something ought to be said on the topic of conference prices. Rather, I think this is where my comment should live - in a place where it can be easily ignored :)

It’s too easy for commenting to descend into trolling, spamming and anonymous jibing. I figure if you have an opinion, get yourself a blog and post it there.

Any comments? ;)

Update, 2013-01-03

I feel a bit less strongly about this now, because despite the principle being sound, I don’t think anyone is really going to respond on their own blog. Ah well. I’ve enabled Disqus commenting on the site, as an experiment.

I’ve been thinking a bit about commenting on blogs.

I’m sure most people who’ve spend an appreciable amount of time on the internet, and reading blogs, have found themselves responding to a blog post in the comments, and realising after the fifth paragraph that their epic riposte really doesn’t belong in a thread of comments, but as a separate-yet-linked piece of writing itself.

The question is, how to maintain the relationship between their new post, on their own blog, and the original inspiration for their response. “Trackback”, I hear you say! Sure, but that has become fodder for spammers, has it not?

Services like disqus also aim to tackle this to some extent, but I still feel like I ought to own my own opinions. Maybe some kind of spam-protected trackback is the way forward? Maybe this is already a solved problem. It’s quite possible.

Huh.

As an aside, this was inspired by my other post about RailsBizConf. I wanted to respond to Obie in more detail than the questionnaire’s text input for ‘other’ allowed, but believe with increasingly fervour that this, interblah.net, my own grand palace of thought-stuff and nonsense, should be the repository for my opinions. After all, where else can I revise my version of the truth with utter impunity?

I wouldn’t want Obie to think that, by making that post on my blog, I felt that something ought to be said on the topic of conference prices. Rather, I think this is where my comment should live - in a place where it can be easily ignored :)

It’s too easy for commenting to descend into trolling, spamming and anonymous jibing. I figure if you have an opinion, get yourself a blog and post it there.

Any comments? ;)

Update, 2013-01-03

I feel a bit less strongly about this now, because despite the principle being sound, I don’t think anyone is really going to respond on their own blog. Ah well. I’ve enabled Disqus commenting on the site, as an experiment.

Obie and a few others tweeted about Zuul earlier today - a plugin for adding ‘role-based authentication’ to Rails. I had a quick look at the code to see it’s particular take on this common problem, but was struck by an unfortunate aspect of it’s current implementation.

When you requre zuul.rb, the following code is run:

Class.class_eval do
  include Zuul::ValidRoles::ClassMethods
end

Why is it adding this behaviour to Class, instead of ActiveRecord::Base? The code to do the latter is even commented out above!

By doing this, now every object now gains a valid_roles method, but this method calls ActiveRecord methods internally, so it’s not actually possible to call it on a ‘normal’ Ruby object without matching ActiveRecord’s API:

module Zuul
  module ValidRoles
    # ...
    module ClassMethods
      def valid_roles(*roles)
        attr_protected :role
        write_inheritable_attribute(:roles, roles)
        include InstanceMethods
      end
    end
    # ...
  end
end

In my opinion, this is pretty rude. If you were to ask any instance if it responds to valid_roles now, they will always say ‘yes!’ enthusiastically, leaving your code completely obliviously to the fact that calling that method will blow up completely.

Unless there’s a great reason to add something to every object in a running process, we should try to restrict the scope of our behavioural changes as much as possible. In the case of Zuul, valid_roles only belongs on ActiveRecord user classes.