[ndotoulaya]

With most posts I've made, there haven't been any comments. But the few comments I have gotten have been intelligent and useful, letting me know what I was doing right or wrong so I could work on making my posts better in the future.

Some members think that a larger percentage of viewers should show their appreciation with comments. Other members view pure comment posts (no images) as clutter. Both views seem valid, and under a different system it would be possible to accommodate everyone. People making especially important comments that they felt should be included in the main thread could continue to make their comments there (this would keep the ratio of image posts to comment posts to a reasonable level). People that just want to express appreciation (or disdain) for a particular post could comment to a separate replies area that was tied to that post only (each post could have a "Comments" link, and just adding to the Comments of a post wouldn't bump the thread to the top of the forum). Also, it could be possible to have custom settings on the forums so individual users could specify that only new posts containing images should be marked as new. The current limitations of the site prevent this solution, but ultimately that's the best way to resolve this issue.

In the absence of programming changes to how the forums work, my opinion is that in most cases the members here do a decent job of balancing the competing values of useful feedback vs. feedback clutter. Sure, there are some posts of which I'm particularly proud that got no response at all, but getting a few nice comments on other posts makes up for it.