New Feature: Responses

I'm happy to announce that QuietWrite now officially has "responses." This is our take on commenting. I chose the word "response" because it evokes a much deeper and more reflective interaction than simply commenting.

But don't worry, I designed this feature to be as unobtrusive as possible, and you will have full control on whether people can respond to your published writings. By default, responses are turned off for all existing writings.

Responses in Published Writings

When responses are turn on, there are 2 new buttons at the bottom of published writings:

The first one indicates how many responses there are. Clicking on that will reveal the responses. The second button will bring you to the editor to write a new response to the writing.

Editing Your Responses

The editor in response mode looks like this:

Basically, it's the familiar QuietWrite editor you know and love, except now you can use it to respond to other people's writings. Once you publish your response, it will go live on the writing's page you are responding to. You will always have the power to edit or delete your response, and also, the author of the writing you are responding to can delete your response.

The responses you are working on will show up in the Your Writings page, as a new tab under "Responses":

Turning Responses On or Off

You can turn responses on or off for each individual writing in the "Settings" tab in the editor. Also, there is a global responses default setting in the "Account" tab under Publishing. If the global setting is set to allow responses, all new published writings will default to allow responses.

Keep it classy!

This is the first feature that lets users interact with each other directly. Please, keep your responses constructive and classy. We don't tolerate things like hate speech or other extremely hateful things at QuietWrite, and we will delete responses at will if we see this type of activity.

I am going to work on writing a set of community guidelines which I will publish shortly to address some of these things.

Please try to keep your responses on topic and relevant to the original writing. At QuietWrite, we want encourage deep and contemplative responses, just like our writings! So, please think before you respond.

If you only use QuietWrite as a private journal, nothing has changed! We carefully designed this new feature so that it won't clutter the main intent of QuiteWrite, and that is, to provide a quiet place to write online.

Happy writings (and responding)! And please, respond to this writing with your thoughts.