When you comment on one of our posts (and we hope you will!), you will probably notice a few differences from other blogs. Engineering Science uses an off-the-shelf blogging system (hats off to the Mephisto team), but, being a compulsive software guy, I have souped it up a bit.

Peter and I want Engineering Science to be more of a discussion than a place for us to pontificate. The software enhancements I’ve made are designed to foster good discussions.

1. We make house calls. You can sign up to get an email when we post new material on the blog. It’s quick and relatively painless – click on the "Email alerts" link in the dark blue bar at the top of the page. And don’t worry – it’s easy to unsubscribe, too.

2. Talk amongst yourselves. Most blogs have a flat comment structure. You can comment on the article, but it’s hard to interact with your fellow commenters. We’ve changed that – our comment section is more like a threaded discussion forum. You can comment on the article or on other comments. And, to keep the discussion going, you can elect to receive an email when people reply to one of your comments (again, it’s easy to turn this off).

3. Maximum signal, minimum noise. Large group discussions inevitably generate a mix of good and bad comments. We don’t want to read inappropriate/off-topic/spam comments any more than you do, so we have put in place several mechanisms to highlight good comments and weed out bad ones.
   
   Spam we are taking care of using a sophisticated, automated anti-spam filter. Separating the wheat from the chaff is a more interesting problem. It’s tough to automate, and we don’t want to have to approve all comments by hand (after all, we have real jobs!). Our solution takes a page from digg.com
   
   When a discussion starts, you will see a little green and red +1 / -1 link above each comment. These links let you give feedback on comments. If you like a comment, give it a point (+1); if you don’t, give a negative point (-1). A selector at the top of the comments lets you hide comments whose total score falls below a threshold you specify.

So take a minute and try it out. Leave us a comment. Say hello. We look forward to some good discussions with you!