March 13, 2009 4:03pm by swood | 
Somebody at Gawker Media Network deserves to be boxed soundly about the head and ears. I can’t believe the painful method of user commenting they have implemented for all of their sites. For those who don’t know, Gawker Media runs a bunch of wonderful sites: Consumerist.com, LifeHacker.com, Engadget.com, Kotaku.com, etc.
Their comment system is horrid in a number of ways.
1) First of all, I can’t follow what the hell is going on. Is it just me or is this painfully difficult to follow? This is threading at its worst.
2) Their cutesy, clever “disemvoweler” routine is a painfully bad attempt to solve a problem that has already been solved industry wide. The problem is inappropriate posts on a high traffic blog with a mixed audience.
Upon determining a problem post, Gawker’s solution is to completely mangle the post by removing all the vowels. They call this “disemvowelment” which is cute, “edgy”, “uber” and all that… but it utterly fails. The goal here should be to hide the post from those who are most likely to be offended. I mean, why not just go ahead and delete the post? It amounts to the same thing, because a disemvoweled post is completely unreadable and therefore useful to no one.
Other sites do this better by assigning a threshold to all users behind the scenes… say “3″. They provide a “report abuse” link with each post. If a post is crap, their loyal users will click “report abuse”. With each click, the threshold of the post increases. When it increases beyond 3 it will be hidden from most users automatically.
The post will be replaced with a link stating “this post is beyond your acceptable viewing threshold”. The user is then free to click the link to reveal the original post at their discretion.
It’s really quite simple and elegant. Both of which Gawker is apparently, not.
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