Los Angeles — The Palo Alto, California, social media networking giant Facebook on Tuesday unhinged its mighty jaws and consuming up the entire Internet with the blog announcement of an updated Comments Box plug-in for website publishers with more granular controls for moderating discussions and to customize the comments widget which publishes user comments made on third party websites to your Facebook profile, and vice versa.
Facebook announced few indispensable updates, the first of which is meant to make conversations more relevant. Facebook launched a Comments Box plugin that empowers publishers to add their sites by copying and pasting a single line of Facebook code, features what the company calls a finer “social relevance”. Now, when you visit a site with a Facebook Comments widget, you will see comments from friends first, for example.
For isntance, the box will display more outstanding comments posted by a website visitor’s friends or friends of friends. It also will take the popularity of comments into consideration in ranking, and it will flag and hide spam, Facebook said.
“Comments are ordered to inform users the most relevant comments from friends, friends of friends, and the most liked or active discussion threads, while comments marked as spam are hidden from view,” Facebook’s Ray He wrote in a blog post.
Online publishers have long deliberated on how to bring a measure of civility to their comments forums, which are frequently populated by insults and off-topic ramblings by readers cloaked in anonymity. So now be aware, do not blindly blather because you cannot be bothered to read the fine print.
Soft-launched last year, Comment Box is a serious game changer in the world of Internet comments, further associating third party websites with your Facebook account, heralding an Internet of the very near future where even when you leave Facebook for other parts of the Web, you are never really gone.
Moreover, users get to see information about commenters that they make publicly available on Facebook, such as work title, age and current city, as well as mutual friends, according to the company.
Site administrators get more controls over comments, including the option of making them by default visible to everyone or visible only to the commenter and their friends, as well as blacklisting certain words and banning certain users. Additionally, administrators also get access to a centralized dashboard from where they can moderate discussion threads across their entire website from a single interface.
Facebook asserts that its more than 500 million members use real names and its comments platform shows the Facebook profile picture and name of a reader making a comment.
The feature also empowers end users to post their comments on their Facebook activity streams, and thus share the comments with friends there as well. Their friends in turn can respond to the comments from their Facebook interfaces and have them appear on the external site.
Users will also come-across Comment Box on non-Facebook websites of the near future if you have not already. You will find it on many of the TODAY Show blogs such as the The Clicker and Kathy Lee & Hoda. Among the websites testing Facebook’s updated Comments Box tool is TechCrunch, which said the platform may spell “bad news for you trolls and spammers” who haunt the comments section of the popular technology blog.
On the privacy issue, Facebook is providing site owners with some enhance moderation tools, including the ability to make new comments visible to everyone or open to the commenter and their friends. Admins can also serve as moderators by clicking a box against a comment viewed as spam or abusive, blacklist words and ban users.
Lastly, Facebook said it will soon add new log-in providers so those who are not Facebook members can still comment.