What Neocities really needs 2024-07-28
Comments.
I should be able to just type something like {{{comments}}} onto my page, and a comments widget like the one on the side would appear there. I know there's third party services like HTML Comment Box, but the problem is that it's external:
- I want to see notifications about comments when I go to Neocities, not go to some third party website separately. I also want to manage/moderate comments from Neocities immediately when I see a bad comment.
- I want people to need an account in order to comment (so it's easier to moderate and to manage spam), but I don't want to require you to go to a third party website. Neocities users already have a Neocities account, it should just work.
- It can never be as effortless to create a comment section through a third party website, than it would be to just type the aforementioned tag onto the page. I have a lot of pages, I would have to go through a process to create all those comment sections separately.
- If the third party service is discontinued, all the comments on my website would just get deleted.
- I don't want to pay a third party service just to have basic features like full customization and banning people.
- An external service absolutely cannot work without either Javascript or an iframe, I don't want to require people to use javascript, and iframes are contained so the contents are hard to style and the size is hard to adjust based on content.
- I don't trust third party services. If they embed some user data tracking feature onto my page, there's nothing I can do about it.
It often feels like I'm stuck alone in my own box because there's a lack of feedback. People can comment on the activity feed on the outside, but I think that's a pretty poor place to interact in, it feels like a weird detached meta-comment section, like reading what people say about my website on Twitter. Sure you can interact there, but it's just not the same, and I don't really want to go there at all ever. I also don't get notified about the comments on my feed, and unless I'm dumb, there's no way to reply to people. I usually update several pages at the same time, I don't care about comments for site updates, I want comments to be for a specific page, shown in that page.
I'm not as motivated to write a good page and use as many images as I could since I'm in a black box and can't see anyone reading it. I considered putting a lot of images about the different games in my previous diary, but felt like there's no point putting in all that effort just for myself. If I knew more concretely that people are reading because I could see people interacting with it, I would want to put more effort into the reading experience.
I also would be more motivated to find other websites in Neocities myself and comment on them. Back when I used Deviantart, I found that comments are a great way to find other people who share similarities interests with whatever they're commenting on, whether it's you or some other art/artist you like. Whenever someone commented on my page, I would check out their gallery, and many of them I'd end up following or even becoming friends with.
It would allow people to use Neocities as a complete substitute to social media. You could just interact with people in your own spaces and create interesting subcultures and stuff.
Widgets
If the ability to attach a comment widget was a thing, that leads to the question: what other widgets could you add?
Poll Of The Week: who's the strongest?
Here's some ideas I can think of from the top of my head:
- Polls and surveys.
- Pageview counter.
- Likes/dislikes.
That list was shorter than I thought it would be. There's many things you can already implement with Javascript, but fundamentally the problem is that you can't add any kind of server-side logic. You can't receive comments because there's nothing you can put into your website that receives information and stores it somewhere. To be honest I think that's fine, adding server-side code would open a pandora's box of problems and would allow people to use Neocities like a normal web host, possibly to it's detriment. The next best thing is these widgets that Neocities designs for people to use.
In theory it doesn't necessarily have to be a {{{weird tag}}}. If Neocities exposed some kind of comments API for Javascript, people could make their own implementations. The downside is that users would need to have Javascript enabled, and it might be hard to prevent you from adding someone else's comment section onto your page. The upside is that it might make Neocities' job easier, I could use javascript to implement whatever widget I want by querying some generic form results data, the same system could be used for a like/dislike counter or a poll/survey.
I don't care so much about the other things, but I really want comments. Neocities has comments on people's feeds, so they already have similar functionality. There's one potential exploit, which is that my website could use Javascript to write a comment and submit it, which would appear on my page as a comment from your account, so there would be fake comments from anyone who visits my page. There's ways to get around that (like re-directing commenters to a confirmation page first), but it's something to consider.
An esoteric downside would be that if you expect to receive comments, but don't, it may make you demotivated from updating your website. If you don't know, then you may live in the illusion that people are interested, and keep updating it as if there's an audience even if there isn't. I don't personally care about that kind of thing too much, I mostly just want a place to put my things and thoughts, but I do wonder if that would end up reducing activity in Neocities more than the allure of making connections would increase it.
I know there's always a few people interested in everything though. I once made a hidden board in 8chan that I treated as a personal blog where I basically vented my frustrations and posted random thoughts or weird roleplay-like comments or whatever I felt like. I think I deleted some stuff or said that I'd stop posting or just hadn't posted in a while or something, and someone commented saying that they liked reading it. That took me by surprise, but I guess there's always someone interested in anything.