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In the previous article, I discussed my thoughts on the subject of comments as a structure and what comments could be capable of if that structure was improved. But, when I showed that to several people, the comment was, quite legitimately, that I didn’t explain what could be built on top of that. I had another topic in mind before covering this, but that made me want to document this as well.

Let’s start with webmentions. Webmentions builds on the idea of the two protocols that are built into WordPress: Pingbacks and Trackbacks. Trackbacks have to be discarded from WordPress. There is no verification of them…it is basically letting anyone post something on your site…moderated or not. The other site tells you they’ve linked to you(even if they haven’t) and what to make it look like on your site. And because of this…while I’ve tried to think of ways to save it, I think it needs to, over time, go on the chopping block.

Pingbacks, despite actually verifying that a URL links to where it says it does, currently don’t do anything else interesting in WordPress. The appearance and usage has stagnated. It could be improved on the display side, and I’ve tried to get interest in that…but I’m wondering as we move forward…considering the legacy design issues, the bad feelings, what I would like to see happen with comments, etc…if we should just let Pingbacks stay where they are with only some performance and other minor refinements, and develop Webmentions.

Webmentions have advantages. They support update and delete functionality if the source changes in the future. They have a standard recommended by the W3C(which the previously implemented protocols do not), as well as a dedicated community who has implemented them on their sites.

What was never realized in potential by previous protocols, but Indieweb community members are implementing is the magic. Someone links to your site with a post on their site. They use webmention to tell you that they linked to you. But what your site does at that point is controlled by you. You can parse their post and display it as a comment, or based on how their page is marked up, derive other meaning and relationships from it. You can just use it in a simple counter or stat display to note how many people linked to you. There have been some fun discussions of using it to share bibliographic data.

If you had to pick one thing, webmention is the key building block on which the Indieweb is built. By itself, it requires no trust on the part of the receiver. There is a developing extension called Vouch which allows the sender to provide proof that someone the receiver knows trusts them. And, moderation aside, presentation of this is wholly left to the receiving site. Back to the comment point in the previous article on this, one of the functional WordPress problems is that there is no way for a plugin to declare a custom comment type and tell the theme how to display it or whether to display it at all. You effectively have to hijack the comment template to do this, instead of working with it.

To the point of something like annotations, the idea of fragmentions which allow a specific part of a post to be referenced more effectively…WordPress doesn’t support inline comments of any type or marginalia. There is a trac ticket to implement the W3C’s work on annotations, but WordPress has nothing to allow for displaying this sort of work.

There is a current Webmentions plugin for WordPress that is under continual development. It was created by Matthias Pfefferle, and I have been a regular contributor to it. It handles the functional plumbing of webmentions, but not the improved display aspect. That has been delegated by its creator to a second plugin, Semantic Linkbacks, which attempts to offer the parsing of external sites and deriving information like author(name and photo), etc.

It is worth trying the combination of these. But there is more that can be done here as well. Cover more types, improve the ability to store commenter’s data, etc.

In the Indieweb world, your domain is your identity. This would suggest that most WordPress sites should only have one user…representing the identity of the site. Users, however, represent roles and responsibilities within the system, not necessarily content creators.

In an update to the ‘official’ Indieweb plugin, I, with some encouragement, added the idea of designating a specific user as the ‘identity’ of the site…assuming there was one.  But let’s expand that idea a bit. We have user metadata, we have the ability to define new roles and capabilities. So, what can we do with this but create new possibilities? We can better work what a role is, and add additional properties and behavior to improve the system.

There is a setting for an admin email, for which the suggestion to expand outward has been proposed for 8 years in this vein. This should be a property of any administrative account.

I have an idea I’ve long wanted to implement. It is based on a feature used by Postmatic. People who subscribed to the email service they provided would end up as users on your site. I’d like to see enhancements to the user profile. When trying to add other site profiles to user metadata, I discovered that this being left to the plugins has resulted in a complete lack of consistency.

There needs to be a consistent structure to add data to support URLs on specific other types of sites( for example, Twitter), or every plugin is going to have to retread this. This is the trouble we have with all metadata unfortunately.

That idea of using the user table for outside visitors has a lot of good potential. Commenters could create a profile on your site that could be imported from elsewhere…namely your own website. There is a certain level of trust there, because you would be displaying images and text about a person from another site…however, that is what gravatar does. Why not allow people to do it from their own site?

Gravatar itself is something that WordPress wouldn’t have put in today….a reliance on an outside service. The local avatar trac ticket is also a rather old request. It is time to look at avatars in general…to build a robust local system that is enhanced by gravatar…gravatar should not be that system. We can add in modern themeable profiles for users, as opposed to just archive pages. We can make a much better system for users.

The whole point of the ‘subscriber’ role in WordPress is for people not part of the blog to have an account they can do something with…follow the site, get updates, participate in comments…but this part of WordPress is woefully underused.