BuddyPress.org

I share Mike’s original concern about forking conversations. (And I giggled a bit when I wrote “forking conversations”. Fork yeah!) And I think r-a-y’s solution is a really nice one, if it’s doable: allow site admins to turn off inline commenting on certain kinds of activity items. That way we can still take advantage of activity commenting for things like status updates, friendships, etc.

Another thought: Maybe an admin option to turn off excerpts in activity would prevent forking. When I post a new blog or forum post, an update might appear on the activity feed that says “Boone posted a new blog entry: Boone’s Blog Post”, but without an excerpt. People could still comment in ways that make sense (“Boy Boone, you blog a lot”) but they wouldn’t really be able to leave substantive comments on the content of the blog entry/forum post, since it wouldn’t appear on the activity stream. Again, it takes a bit away from what could be great about the activity comments, but it has the virtue of keeping all conversation in one place.