The Joel on Software Discussion Group

I suspect that this kind of 'meta' post is likely to be removed, but what the heck, I'll give it a try anyway. This forum has always been high-quality and a great place to discuss software issues,  of which the most interesting ones start from a JoS article poking around in some 'common wisdom' or whatever.

But one thing has always bugged me: why is there no link at the bottom of each article saying 'discuss this article' that points to a first, automatically - or even manually, whatever, it takes 2 seconds - created article with the post's title as subject.

Joel must know this, because he once implemented this very thing trough reddit, but when that didn't work out he also threw out the baby with the bathwater. It is very convenient to easily find comments related to a specific article, especially if it is not a recent one (I'd love to read some comments on his 'biculturalism' classic for example, and no I won't google it, he owns his own forum NAMED Joel On Software darn it) .

Of course, there's always many ad-hoc threads popping up, discussing one point of an article or whatever, and this is fine, but it's no excuse.

Thanks for listening to my rant - even if you're just the moderator erasing it :-)

But, the commentary on the articles doesn't start with Joel saying 'discuss' at the bottom of his article :)

We start them, we continue them, we destroy/deface them.

Nobody from JoS seems to be involved in the actual writing, just the moderating.

Hmmmm... Still, even putting a link 'discussion about this article' at the bottom would make sense, again, especially for the older articles.

I just believe quick access to discussion among your pears about a given article/content make it all the more interesting (case in point: reddit wouldn't be half as popular without the Comments section). And surely Joel cares about adding value to his site, right?

Hey wow, I just reread 'fire and motion' and it actually has a 'discuss' link below it pointing to a forum thread of the same title.

So I guess, much like the 'no signup required' thingie, it first was there, for defendable reasons, and then it was scrapped from the 'feature list'.

So Joel, why'd you ditch it? What went wrong with giving readers at least - one - discussion about the article to read?

Ok ok I'll stop whining and move on now.