Great Ideas for Effective Comments

Some great ideas from the engtech blog about ways to fix broken comment systems.  It caught our attention, since we are in the beginning phases of adding comments to TekTag.  We were going to just do the usual, but this entry has given us pause.  Here are the suggestions:

• Keep a running total comment score of someone’s total negative/positive comments and display that publicly on their profile.
• Top 100 positive commenters list. The top 100 submitters did wonders for getting people to devote huge amounts of time to improving the site, top commenters could do the same thing. Of course, this will never happen.
• Display someone’s comment score to them while they are logged in. Make them conscious that people are reading and reviewing what they write.
• Comment karma where if you have been identified as a negative contributor any new comments will start out with a negative value. So many negative comments are click-bys where the user doesn’t return to see the results of their actions.
• Temporary automatic bans from commenting if someone’s comment score becomes too low (for the extreme conditions — or maybe automatic reporting of the user to the Digg staff).

We'd be curious to hear what any of you think.