FAQs

  1. Who is behind this service?
    It’s operated by Helpful Technology, a digital innovation firm set up by Steph Gray, who developed and open sourced the Commentariat WordPress theme while he worked at the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. Steph has launched and supported dozens of online commentable documents in various formats, and has been at the forefront of popularising the approach in the UK public sector.
  2. I thought Commentariat was open source. Why isn’t this free?
    Commentariat was released under the GNU Affero licence in 2009. This site uses its successor, Commentariat2 developed by a private company, Helpful Technology commissioned by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Commentariat2 doesn’t really share any code with its predecessor, though it does the same kind of job. Still, in the spirit of open source, we’ve made the basic theme source code available for reuse under the same licence, though the custom code developed to enable easy customisation and custom plugins are not being released for now, sorry. We have to eat.
  3. How much traffic can you handle?
    It’s very hard to give a firm answer as much will depend on the length of the document and the volume of traffic to other sites on the platform at the time, but we’ve chosen a scalable, virtualised cloud host to enable us to quickly scale up capacity for large projects on a temporary basis. Think tens of thousands of visitors an hour.
  4. It still seems like quite a lot of hassle
    This service is primarily a self-managed platform for you to publish your own documents and we think our clients will enjoy the flexibility of being able to customise their site. If you want us to handle the whole project including site setup and content entry, we’d be happy to provide you with an estimate under our Jim’ll Fix It package.
  5. What technology platform are you running on?
    R+C uses node-based hosting provided by VPS.net, a UK & US hosting provider. We use Xen virtualised Ubuntu machines running LAMP technologies to support WordPress 3.0 in multisite mode.
  6. Is my data secure?
    Yes, data is stored at VPS.net‘s UK datacentre in London on their RAID10 SAN and backed up nightly via rsync. Since WordPress arguably stores ‘personal data’ in the form of commenters’ email addresses and IP addresses, these are protected by our privacy policy. Sites have a maximum lifespan of 12 months before being archived, at which point data is removed from our servers, and you are advised to arrange an archive copy of the public-facing parts of your site.
  7. Can you host other WordPress themes for me here, like Digress.it for paragraph level document commenting?
    Though we could, we prefer not to use this platform to host other themes. If you want a regular blog, try WordPress.com or for hosting of documents which require very granular comments at paragraph level or the sophisticated features of Digress.it, try the excellent WriteToReply.
  8. So are you trying to put WriteToReply out of business?
    No, they do a grand job, but offer a different kind of tool. R+C is about giving you a flexible platform to create a site for your commentable documents that looks and works the way you want it to, and gives you features like a blog to build ongoing engagement with your audience. WriteToReply is a research & development platform, and a great choice for documents that need granular comments or access to paragraph-level URIs and specific RSS feeds. Horses, courses.
  9. Can you upload all my content for me?
    We’d be happy to. Get in touch about our Jim’ll Fix It package.
  10. I like the layout, but could you just tweak…?
    Maybe. Some visual tweaks can be achieved in the custom stylesheet rules you can add to each site and we can help with that. Others may need us to develop a customised version of the Commentariat2 theme for you, and we may ask you to upgrade to the Jim’ll Fix It package.
  11. Does my site have to have the url http://mydomain.readandcomment.com?
    Not necessarily. For a start, UK Government sites are required to use and promote a URL along the lines of http://www.department.gov.uk/documentname which could redirect to a R+C site. But we could work with you to map a subdomain of your site to a R+C site. Anything is possible.
  12. What if I have more than one document to publish?
    You could buy two or more R+C sites, or publish one document, then remove it and replace it with another. Or you could set up your site with subsections for each document. If you think you might want to do a lot of commentable document sites, you could talk to us about commissioning your own commentable document platform on your own domain.

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