Can’t find the source. Maybe it was just my own wishful thinking or someone else somewhere explained it wrong. That’s why I put “advertised” in quotation marks. But I’m glad you see my point.
As for the overall aim of improving the quality of discussion: if you are implying that it’s not just technical reasons why people can’t comment on the spot (i.e. under the post) but that it is actually intentional to drive people into the forum, then I’m not sure I’d agree with that aim. Of course, increasing the quality is good, but the way WP-discourse currently works, there is a high price to be paid for this: people have to login to comment (or did I miss something again?) which means you probably lose a significant number of comments. Not from those who have an account, but from passers-by who couldn’t be bothered to create an account.
I definitely don’t want to lose those comments and so I am currently trying to come up with the best way to set this up. Here are some thoughts:
- Two reasons why I hesitate to use discourse as my only commenting tool: a) I don’t think I want to publish all posts/pages on the forum (but that might be because I’m not sure what that would mean in practice) and b) because I don’t want to lose those passer-by comments.
- Currently, this apparently means that I need to decide whether I should a) not use discourse on WP at all, b) use it side-by-side with WP comments, or c) use it side-by-side with some other commenting plugin (such as Replyable by Postmatic)
- Ultimately, none of these three options are satisfactory. a) would just be a pity, b) looks confusing (if not ugly) and c) is probably even worse than b). Both b) and c) just don’t make sense in the long run, because why should you maintain two commenting systems.
I will have to explore b) and c) further but what I really want to say: I think it would be worth developing the plugin so that option d) becomes viable: use only discourse for comments. My hunch is that a good way forward would be to provide a simplified commenting box under each WP post that does not require login. Or perhaps, rather than providing your own box just use the WP commenting function and pull over all approved comments to WP (and pull over the post too, if necessary). If the email address under which the comment was submitted does not exist in discourse, it automatically creates a user account and posts the comment under that account.
Any plans in that direction?