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We are just finalizing the comment service in our new CRM/CMS application and arrived to a point, where we have to decide how exactly the comment service should work?

  1. Facebook style - Fresh comment on the bottom, top comments collapse
  2. Forum style - Fresh comment on the top, in case of reply @somebody is displayed
  3. Forum style with citation - Fresh comment on the top, the content of the replied comment is quoted
  4. Blog style - Fresh comment on the bottom, in case of reply @somebody is displayed and linked to the given comment (no quotation)

Which solution do you prefer for an online CRM/CMS like application, where you can add your comment to a page, picture, media file, etc? Or do you have any other solution, which would be optimal in this case?

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3 Answers 3

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It depends:

  1. Facebook style is good when having lots of comments and last are the more important (all are aware of history and you have notifications)

  2. Fresh content in top is good for activity feeds so you let users see few last updates above the fold. (you don't need notifications)

  3. Citations may be done in twitter style: "in reply"

  4. Blog style is good when you need users see all comments before commenting. (no teams)

IMHO I prefer option 3 for a CRM. It's simplier, and you can think to have a team activity feed. For a CMS i will choose option 1 or 4 depending on whether you will have notifications or not.

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IMO: Blog style is the least desirable. Facebook style is the edges out the forum styles due to everyone's familiarity with the concept.

As the saying goes nothing online is intuitive therefore mimicking other well known and used designs is the best way to make your product intuitive.

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  • So you prefer Facebook style? Because there's only a litte difference between Facebook and Blog style, which is the 'collapse older comments' function of FB.
    – Roland Pokornyik
    Commented Nov 29, 2011 at 13:04
  • What are your thoughts on it?
    – Chris Kluis
    Commented Nov 29, 2011 at 21:10
  • I would try the 4. option, and if users don't like it expand it to the well known 1. option popularized by Facebook. The main thing is that at about 90 % of pages there won't be any comments, so we don't have to deal with the collapse function.
    – Roland Pokornyik
    Commented Nov 30, 2011 at 9:30
  • The main aim of my question was to get any info about what others think and didn't want to influence anybody with my opinion.
    – Roland Pokornyik
    Commented Nov 30, 2011 at 9:33
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I personally think it depends on whether you want your users to "interact" between their comments on the shared topic - in that case Forum or FB like - otherwise if the comments are not related to each other I'd stick to a BLOG or Forum methodology.

Honestly - try to make it as a templating system, this way you can always change in the future to better adapt your users and their actual usage.

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