No doubt like other readers of ForeignPolicy.com, I've been frustrated for months with the really crappy comment management system used on the articles, called Livefyre.
Of course, Livefyre sucks wherever you find it because it enables anonymous comments, and that always makes for unaccountable idiocy and nastiness.
The gold standard these days is to have Facebook log-ins for comments, as that forces people to use their real-life identity, and therefore their remarks attach to their online reputation -- and that's a good thing.
I'm all for pseudonymous accounts and their rights, and it's possible to build up a good persistent identity online even with a pseudonym, but the worst thing is to be in a setting where you reveal your identity but the other commenters hide and snipe at you -- such is the atmosphere on many websites and we're all used to it.
Livefyre gets especially frustrating and stupid on ForeignPolicy.com, however, because of the mechanics of how it dysfunctions.
You've probably noticed that when you get a notification that someone has responded to your comment, if you click on the link in your email, it "goes nowhere" -- you get to a page with an error message. Perhaps you conclude that the comment -- which might seem nasty more often than not -- was removed by moderators -- but actually, it isn't most of the time.
If you are curious, you might try logging into the site, or noting that you are logged in already and try again -- maybe that's the issue?
But you'll discover that in fact that makes no difference -- you can't reach that story by that link no matter what, even logged in.
So if you are like most people, you give up at this point (or you did even before) because comments under The Cable or Passport or Shadow Government -- where all kinds of trolls hang out and harass those who disagree with them -- aren't worth answering.
So maybe Foreign Policy likes it this way -- by keeping this built-in, engineered dysfunction, they probably cut their comments in half or less.
Of course, that failure to keep reader stickiness hurts their ad clicks and their overall bottom line, so some grown-up should try to explain to them that they need to swallow their nerdy "progressive" pride and let people talk as much as they want on their comments, given that they're open and not moderated -- or at least, not pre-moderated.
But in order to get at this problem, you'll have to be very persistent -- and penetrate the wall of geek assholery that perpetrated this situation in the first place -- and will make it hard to fix. Namely:
o The geeky editors -- Blake Hounsell and company -- don't care what happens in the comments. They chose a system that they vaguely thought would enable more comments and more free speech -- and maybe they suffered from the usual geeky hatred of Facebook as a "walled garden" -- but in fact they didn't do due diligence to see if it actually works. Why? Well, they don't really want comments. The authors never answer them. They never appear even to have read them. They are for the masses -- especially those "low information voters" so loathed by the Twitterati -- to entertain each other, not for real reader engagement.
o The geeks at Livefyre itself refuse to care about what they view as Foreign Policy's problem. It's not their business to try to make the FP customer's experience better; we're not their customer -- FP is their customer. They view their job as only the narrow patch between their servers and the commenter, and whether that fully integrates smoothly with foreignpolicy.com itself is really not something they can be arsed to worry about. Not my server, not my problem. It's just an API or whatever it is, they handle it, and if half the people are lost using it, too bad. Let FP figure it out.
The combination of the arrogant foreign policy nerds (see their admissions policy if you want to learn how snotty they are) and the arrogant Livefyre nerds means that the readership of Foreign Policy can go fish. That's how they like it. In fact, it ensures that only the most dedicated and determinated (or the most obsessive with the ability to hang out online all day) will go to the trouble to search in the huge cluttery clusterfuck that is the front page and side bars of FP for articles they once commented on and find their comments manually to be able to answer the other fucktards that cranked at them below some hipster's blog post about Syrian rebels or Chuck Hagel.
So hence this correspondence below with Lifefyre. The language, the attitude, the assumptions will be familiar to those long-suffering denizens of the JIRA or bug-tracker in Second Life, so I include it here for your enlightenment. Maybe -- as I said -- some grown-up at the switchboard over there at FP will wake up and figure out that they need to create dynamically-updating URLs for their articles so that they don't go out of date even within a few hours and prevent commenting and trackbacks from working and therefore cutting out gadzillion return visits to the site and ruining traffic and CPM.
If you click to go to the first menu, and pull down the option "support" and type up your message -- it simply won't go through. It keeps demanding that you specify a "department". Of course, you've done that already, duh, on the pull-down menu -- but it's not enough. It's broken. This is the first stage where the system shakes loose those people determined enough -- like me -- to be curious about why their email links don't click through to the comments on the website, and to try to do something about it.
So you have to get out of that go-nowhere loop and click through to Lifefyre itself -- then shake off the intrusive alternatives of "answers in the knowledge base" that geeks always impose on you to try to shake you loose from filing a complaint *again* -- and click through with your report.
So here's the correspondence -- and obviously what FP needs to do is stop being so dilatory about mapping their URLs to dynamically-updating unique IDs for articles so that this problem does not happen.
Yes, this is more coding and that ever-expanding "free and open source software" budget balloons out with $50/hour coders and the "commuuuuunity" who are supposed to "help" with things like that.
I don't know the back story of the code cave at FP, but it could be just script-kiddies or arrogant 40-somethings helping Anonymous LOIC attacks in between casually creating web pages on the CMS.
The point is, Blake Hounshell and the others need to come clean on this: are they happy to leave this Lifefyre mess here as it is to cut down on comments which are generally low-quality because they are anonymous?
Are they going to blame the victim and claim it only happens to "a few" people who "don't know how to use the Internet" (I hope I've illustrated here -- complete with screenshots and discussions of URL mapping -- that I'm no slouch here on the Internet.)
Are they willing to face down their own geek code tyrants who will tell them they "can't" do this for some arcane reason (there isn't any good reason) or that they "have" to use Lifefyre (and can't move to Facebook or Disqus like normal people do).
The lesson here is that FP needs to stop abusing its reading public and cut through the crap from the coders. FP now goes to great efforts to capture readers on the page by forcing people to log on now to see content. Lifefyre needs to take responsibility for customer dissatisfaction and sit on FP until they get it -- or figure out less absurd ways to fix this situation than manually (!) fixing each lapsed URL (!).
Original message
Thanks for taking the time to reach out to us and for your feedback. Would you mind sharing for which commend did you get that notification from? Any other specifics you can provide will be great. I'll team up with an engineer to figure out whats going on here.
Thanks Catherine, looking forward for your response.
Dhara
Here are two screenshots that illustrate the problem with every single comment notification I get from foreignpolicy.com
They never work, and each click leads to an error message even if I am logged in to that site as you can see.
Catherine
Thanks for the screenshots. This is a common issue on SOFREP's end - once they publish the article, they sometimes change the URL of the article and this change doesn't reflect on our end. As a result. the emails still contain the old links and when a user clicks on it, they are directed to the old URL and see the 404 page. If you can find the article on their site ans send me the URL,I can manually change it from our end. This should fix the issue for you.
Hope this makes sense, Catherine. Let me know if you've further questions on this - happy to provide more insight.
Thanks,
Dhara
That's absurd. I can't be hunting the new URLs of articles and then send them to you constantly to manually change it -- there are hundreds of these articles.
And the URL changes within hours and then Livefyre as a platform becomes completely pointless and stupid.
When web sites use Disqus or Facebook commenting systems, this kind of insanity doesn't happen. Obviously there are ways to have the dynamically changing URLs that move off the front page and into back pages or archives still retain their connection to discussions.
But your company is just not discovering them.
Links shouldn't break like this so easily and instead of blaming the problem on the content provider, you should figure out how to accommodate this -- Disqus and Facebook do.
Foreign Policy is losing tons of reader comments this way. Oh, maybe that's the idea.
Catherine
I'll jump in here for Dhara as she's headed out of office. Unfortunately, dynamically updating URL's in our database each time a site opts to change a permalink isn't functionality we support. We're not blaming the content provider for anything, they're simply operating in a manner that our product does not support and we've contacted them about that.
In the future, if you provide us with the article title and old URL, we'd be happy to manually change that. If not, unfortunately there's nothing we can do from our end.
Have a great weekend,
Jeremy
While we do support changing permalinks, we don't support it with FP's current integration as they don't use an article identifier, a la WordPress, which, no matter the change in URL, always maps to the same unique ID. FP does not use such URL mapping, and thus we don't support the dynamic updating of their URL's as there's a new ID for each new URL they create instead of the same one no matter the changes made. Once they move toward that type of URL mapping, we'll be able to support those URL changes dynamically.
Thank you for allowing me to clarify, and have a good weekend.
Jeremy
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