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.
I notice someone has posted a potential solution to your lazyweb query, but I do not think this it is what you are ultimately after. You want a plugin and the solution mentioned is a php script. The other thing is that I think with the php solution as it stands you would receive notifications of all comments not just responses to the ones you make (although I have not closely looked at the script so I could be mistaken).
You're right, this script creates a single mailing list and sends out notifications to all subscribers each time a comment is posted (that's how I understand it). Not as fine grained as wanted. And the best combination remains with the threaded comments (which it doesn't do either). May be the solution is to hack MTThreadedComments?
I'm not sure. I am fairly handy with xhtml/css issues, but I make no claims to understand perl. I'm not familiar with lazyweb, but I would hope that because there is a partial solution (but not what you are looking for) that will not stop someone from perhaps taking further interest.