The future of Comment Timeout

This post is more than 17 years old.

Posted at 07:15 on 26 April 2007

A colleague of mine mentioned to me the other day that I ought to read The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks. I haven't done so yet, but I was interested to see from the various reviews that it talks about the "second-system effect" -- that the second version of a system that you design will tend to be over-engineered, since it has all the features that you thought about for the first version but didn't implement due to time constraints. It means going from a small, elegant, successful system to something large, feature-laden and bloated. Scope creep, in other words.

I've been thinking about this as far as the next version of my Comment Timeout plugin is concerned. The original idea was quite simple: to close comments on your blog entries after a certain length of time. The current version has extended well beyond that remit, with a whole bunch of other features that, while useful and maybe related from a technical perspective, aren't really related from the end user's point of view to what the plugin is ostensibly trying to do. I wonder if this is probably a bit confusing for users and making it a bit difficult to determine whether issues are due to bugs in the code itself or people misunderstanding what it's supposed to be doing.

I think the answer is probably to separate it out into different plugins, each of which concentrates on doing a single thing and doing it well. At the moment, I'm thinking of separating it into three different plugins, perhaps something along these lines:

  • Comment Timeout 2.0: a trimmed-down version, which concentrates solely on the job of closing comments on old posts after a certain length of time.
  • The Black Hole: the functionality to nuke comments altogether if they contain BBCode, too many hyperlinks, or certain keywords, so they don't even make it as far as your spam queue.
  • Three Strikes and You're Out: the bit that examines your Bad Behavior logs and spam queue and closes comments to IP addresses that are persistently causing trouble.

I'd be interested to know what people think of this idea. Would it make it easier to understand, or would it just make things a bit more confusing? Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.