Today I have a new question from Louis Le regarding commenting on Profy blogs. He seems to have a great experience in hunting for bugs and usability deficiencies, by the way.

I tried to test the "comments" feature offered at the end of each post.

Each time I click on "comments", the pointer jumps to the top of the page: is this normal?

I then had to scroll back down and found either "reply" next to "comments" or sometimes nothing at all.

I had to click on "reply" again to have a window appear for me to type in the comment. This means I had to do two actions to get to that window. Is there any way that we can get to the window directly from the first click on "Comments"?

This is a known usability bug that our coders promise to fix very soon because you are the second user already (I was the first one) that is not satisfied with having to click and scroll so many times when you simply want to leave a comment to a post.

Here is the description of how it will work when fixed:

  • Each blog post (even when viewed from the blog’s main page) will have 2 links right below the post’s content: the existing one that shows the number of comments and another one (‘Reply’) that will permit you to post your own comment without having to view all the previous comments first.
  • When you click any of the above links (number of comments if you want to read the comments or ‘Reply’ when you want to send your own reply to the post), you will be taken directly to the place of the screen that you need (to the comments or to the commenting form depending on which link you clicked) without having to scroll through the entire post content first.

If you (and by you I mean any Profy user here) have other ideas about how commenting could be arranged better, leave your comments below or shoot us an email using the red link above to discuss your suggestions.

When I guest typed in the comment, there is no provision requiring the guest to type in his/her name as well as his/her contact information. I believe that you should offer that feature because sometimes the guest just typed in the comments and forgot to provide his/her name. It then be difficult to know if the comment came from which guest.

You are absolutely right, we are reworking the commenting system right now to allow more readers to submit comments to Profy blogs. In addition to allowing for comments from guests, we will also integrate OpenID support for any user to be able to leave a comment (and his or her details) using the proven identity without additional obstacles.

Once the comments are in, how do you post it after the moderation task is done? I cannot locate a button allowing me to publish those comments.

When you choose the ‘Moderated Comments’ mode from the ‘Comments Mode’ drop-down menu, all the comments submitted by your readers will go to your moderation queue first.



You will be able to see the comments in the ‘Comments’ tab of the ‘Blog’ section.

All the comments that are awaiting moderation have the crossed eye sign next to them.



To approve the comments and have them appear on your blog you will simply have to click this sign – it will result in the sign change from crossed eye to a normal open eye and the comment will appear under the blog post.



Unfortunately, as of now the comments are under code refactoring and this particular feature is not very stable so you may have difficulties approving the comments. And since Profy is not a very densely-populated blogging platform and it has not attracted spammers yet, I believe that it is absolutely safe to use the default option to allow all comments (you will always be able to hide them from public view or delete whenever you feel like doing so).

But when your blog starts to attract some spammers or comments you would prefer not to see on your blog you will always be able to resume using moderated mode for comments – especially since it only takes one click to approve a comment.