New feature related to Mandolin Cafe News

[Scott Tichenor]

This is an announcement about an enhancement to the news articles we publish on this site. See "Mandolin News" link at very top of this page. This change will impact newly published articles.

Starting with the next published news article, which could be tomorrow (Thursday), users will have the ability to make comments about those articles and those comments will be attached and appended to the end of the article. This is a common feature on many web sites and many of you have probably seen or are already familiar with this kind of functionality.

Now, how we do this may be a little different than how you do it at another site.

First off, you can't just let the general public post anywhere without some kind of authentication--unless you want to invite a lot of spam into your site--we don't. We need something to authenticate against, and we'll use this message board. If you're logged in, you'll be able to make a comment about the news article. Now, here's where we depart from how some sites handle this. Those comments will appear both on this message board within this category, *and* at the end of the news article. Why? Because we're using the forum tools to manage all of this, and there's no reason we can't (so we will!).

Also, in this sub-category you won't be able to start a thread, post links, images, videos, etc. and the reason behind this is that we don't want those appearing at attachments in the article for technical reasons (like page load time, negatively impacting layout, etc.). You'll only be able to post text comments. This is a common method of handling comments on news articles. If folks want to post images, links, funny font colors, videos, etc. in regard to a news article they can start a thread in the General area.

Why do we want to add comments to articles? Because often threads are started here that end up being interesting and informative with the subject matter one of the news articles. But, they aren't linked so eventually those two become separated. Having the comments housed with the article makes it more interesting and possibly more informative. This is just an extension of us trying to make forms of communication about mandolins more effective and informative. Could be some minor bugs in this as we launch but we'll take care of those. My thanks to Dan B. for some nicely handled programming to help make this happen.

[astroboy]

Kewl.

:-)