TC3, One Week Later

Scott Hardie | October 26, 2002
It's been a week (technically eight days) since the new Tragic Comedy was launched. So far, I'm happy. People are using it, I am using it, and thanks to Matt, it works!

I find myself missing karma buttons. I liked being able to register approval or disapproval on a topic without having to write a response. But I don't think I'll implement these, for the same reason that The Onion doesn't provide ratings with its reviews: It's always better to explain an opinion than to provide a number instead.

One thing I am considering bringing back is "Good or Bad?". I always loved the idea, and I only got rid of it on TC1 because I had no other way of doing it than by creating a new entry each time, and soon the list of entries was cluttered with "Good or Bad?" entries. This time, it can be put right there in the sidebar. However, this isn't a big deal, and I don't think Matt would want to program it anyway (even though it would work very much like the poll).

I've also made an interesting discovery in just the first week: A lot of topics don't belong in the given subcategories. I thought I had come up with all the subcategories I needed, but I guess not. Just today I created "Sickness" for the alien hand syndrome discussion, and "Anecdotes" for Matt's shocking story. I will add just about any that are requested; use your control panel.

The only thing about it that really annoys me is something that can't really be helped, and that's the need for the
command to be used in topics and updates so that blank lines can appear. I frequently forget to include it, so I have to go back and edit what I just wrote. I also don't like the way that URLs can't appear in the first sentence of a topic (this is because the quote on the main menu is generated by the presence of the first period), but that's easy enough to fix, just don't link until the second sentence.

What other improvements would you make to TC, now that you've had a chance to use it?