ikiwiki/doc/todo/discussion_page_as_blog.mdwn

Look at a discussion page here or eg on wikipedia. It tends to turn into a
mess. One nice way to avoid the mess would be to set it a discussion page
as a blog so each new comment is a separate post.

One issue is, would there be a way to do this for all new discussion pages
by default somehow? Setting up the blog means inserting a preprocessor
directive; and that could somehow happen automatically when the discussion
page is first created. (Creating a bunch of empty discussion pages with
such directives ahead of time would be silly.) Maybe some kind of new page
template system would do the trick, so pages matching */Discussion start
off as a clone of DiscussionTemplate. Although the first person to try to
create the discussion page would still end up in an edit page with that
template, which is not ideal. Hmm.

Thinking about this some more, discussion links for pages that don't yet
have discussion could go directly to the ikiwiki cgi, which could provide a
post form, and create a new discussion page with the necessary inlining.

Another issue is that discussions really want to be threaded. Does that
mean that a page like foo/discussion/question should have its own
foo/discussion/question/(discussion?)/answer page? Of course, rss feeds
don't handle threading, and of course doing this might be dependant on the
issue above. Worrying about threading may be overkill.