Responding Directly

Starting today you might notice something different in the comments of the blog. We’ve created a plugin for WordPress that allows our blog authors to reply directly to a comment and have that reply appear next to the original comment. This should minimize many of the “@username” responses in our comments.

Currently, this feature is only available to the blog authors (you’re used to seeing their responses in red). We’ve debated opening up the option to everybody (and we may still), however, the question we always ask is, “Are we trying to replicate too many forum functions?” The other fear is that threaded comments would turn into this:

As for you WordPress geeks out there, we plan on releasing this plugin along with one other very soon. More on that in a bit.