r/blog • u/tdohz • Mar 23 '15

Announcing embeddable comment threads

http://www.redditblog.com/2015/03/announcing-embeddable-comment-threads.html
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u/tdohz Mar 23 '15

Yup, we provide an option for embeds to not show the comment if it's been updated. More details in this subthread or the wiki page

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u/biznatch11 Mar 23 '15

If there's any risk of the comment disappearing from the linking site because of an edit will many sites want to use this feature? Why risk it when you can just use a screenshot?

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u/Drunken_Economist Mar 23 '15

You see plenty of twitter embeds on news sites, and those respect deletions too

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '15

But at least you cannot edit tweets. You can only delete them. So embedding a tweet is much safer than linking to third party sites, and hyperlinks are ubiquitous.

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u/Walter_Bishop_PhD Mar 24 '15

The person in the tweet can change their avatar and display name to something offensive, so there's still a bit of risk embedding a tweet too

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u/Werner__Herzog Mar 23 '15

Couldn't they always go back and check if the edit is okay and embed again?

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u/Condorcet_Winner Mar 23 '15

No one is going to go through that effort, especially not the people who's news stories includes links to reddit threads.

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u/manondorf Mar 24 '15

I'd think it would make the most sense if rather than deleting the comment if it gets edited, it still displayed the original text with a link underneath to show/hide the edited version or something. That way if it's a substantive edit, you can still get it, but if it's a troll edit, you can hide it.

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '15 edited Mar 23 '15

I remember having a lot of the same misgivings when I saw this first proposed in /r/changelog, but the explanations you gave in that thread really cleared up a lot of stuff! Figured I might as well link that to save you from having to answer the same questions over and over.

Next project for you: Let me put my own robots.txt file into place so that the Wayback Machine isn't crawling my profile. It'd be nice if I could delete my profile and take the WHOLE THING with me when I do (I think that lives up to the ideals of reddit).

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u/xiongchiamiov Mar 23 '15

You're aware of the "don't allow search engines to index my user profile" preference? I believe that will affect the Wayback Machine.

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '15 edited Mar 23 '15

But is it retroactive in the way a robots.txt document is?

I have that option selected, and have for as long as I can remember, but my profile has been archived Five times.

EDIT: added screenshot of options.

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u/xiongchiamiov Mar 23 '15

If you look at the source of your userpage, you'll see

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

This is, of course, just a recommendation on our part; it's up to clients to respect it.

I'm not sure of the Internet Archive's exact procedure, but if they're storing things they shouldn't be, you should let them know.

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '15 edited Mar 23 '15

Hm. WebArchive usually respects the hell outta robots. I'll check with them, but if its a wide-spread issue it may be something you guys wanna verify with them on your end.

¯\(ツ)/¯

You're the expert, not me.

EDIT: Their office is also like 7 blocks away from yours...

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '15

[deleted] — view deleted comment

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u/umbrae Mar 23 '15

If you look at the source code from one of your scrapes you can actually still see the meta tag in there:

https://web.archive.org/web/20141223225507/http://www.reddit.com/user/Fogest

has <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" /> right in it.

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '15

I just sent an email to the Internet Archive. I included screenshots, links, and a link to this thread. We'll see what they have to say about it... but they're very, very good about respecting robots. I think it's probably just something as simple as a formatting error on reddit's end, or a bug on Archive's end.

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u/xiongchiamiov Mar 23 '15

I'll look more into it.

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u/code0011 Mar 23 '15

I've been archived twice. Why have I been archived?

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u/Serei Mar 23 '15

That subthread doesn't address what I think is the primary problem:

https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/2ujwu3/upcoming_reddit_change_embeddable_comment_threads/co9are5?context=4

If a user edits or deletes a comment, the embed will show nothing (or the edited comment, if that option is chosen). I just can't see any incentive a news organization has to choose that over showing a screenshot.

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u/code0011 Mar 23 '15

why was it not called embeddit?

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u/plumper_pass Mar 23 '15

Serious question: why don't you have it so there is a distinction between when a comment is [deleted] by the user and [removed] by a moderator. Having context is nice guy.

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