Just noticed that Dave Winer is wondering which feed readers support the RSS 2.0 comments element, so I thought I’d chime in and mention that FeedDemon is among the many aggregators which support it. When an item contains a comments element, FeedDemon displays a "comment bubble" icon which links to the page containing the comments for that item.
In addition to the standard RSS 2.0 comments element, FeedDemon also supports wfw:comment, wfw:commentRss, slash:comments and the Atom threading extensions.
When an item uses slash:comments or the Atom threading extensions, FeedDemon displays a comment count next to the comment icon, and the count is refreshed when the feed updates. Here’s an example from my feed, which shows an item with four comments:
Finally, FeedDemon displays the orange feed icon with a small comment bubble superimposed on it for items which expose a separate feed for comments on that item (via wfw:commentRss or an Atom "replies" link). Subscribing to the comment feed in FeedDemon is as simple as clicking this icon. Here’s an example from Sam Ruby’s feed showing both a comment count and a comment feed:
In your second graphic the icon (orange) for the Comment Feed has gone AWOL and I still haven’t figured out why but it is one of my most used feature :) so needless to say I am missing it.
A good way to add this feature to your WordPress blog is with this plugin:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/slash-comments/
Thought it might help some of the people out there.
As far as I remember from a report I filed when they were first introduced, the AWOL comment icon is caused by using feeds in synchronized folders. I really wish NGO would fix that, it makes the feature pointless for those of us who live on synched feeds.
I’ve never seen or been able to use the comment icon :(
@Steven: Ah – I didn’t understand what you meant in your blog post about this, but now I see what you mean. When your feed is synched, the <comments> and <wfw:commentRss> elements are being stripped.
For now a simple workaround is to move your feed to an unsynched folder, but I’ll bring this problem up with our platform team today and hopefully get it resolved soon.
@Steven and @Nick — I see Nick is now aware of this, but I’ll just repeat that NewsGator drops the RSS <comments element for some reason. What is the other element being dropped, Nick? TypePad ate your XML tags. :-)
@Dan: Sorry ’bout that! I’ve updated my comment so the elements aren’t stripped.
Thanks, @Nick. Odd that the core “comments” element and “wfw” elements are being stripped, but “slash” elements are not…
So if I understand this correctly by moving my folders to a non-sync status the Comment Icon will return … okie dokie I’ll give that a try but I’m glad we got the team on this now :)