I’m working on a project for a friend and I’ve come across a difficult decision. The project consists of essays, each of which can be challenged, and also commented on. The thing is this, only one person is able to challenge the essay, and then everybody else is locked out and can only comment.
The rebuttals can only be two responses deep, 2,000 words for the first and 500 words for the second. At that point, no more rebuttals – the rest of the discussion takes place in the comments (fixed length of n chars, unlike rebuttals) if the viewers feel the topic wasn’t exhausted.
So I initially decided that rebuttals and comments were structurally the same thing, and I would merely add a boolean field within my comments table to indicate if the comment is_rebuttal. But I’m feeling a bit unsure about that direction.
What would the collective-you suggest? Each essay can have a discussion between two people only, and both only get to speak 2 times. Very similar to comments, but separate.
So I’d probably have a table for ‘conversations’, with fields for the essay poster’s userID, the single responder (initially NULL) and probably a title or abstract. Another table would contain ‘essays’ with fields for the essay or rebutter’s userID, the conversationID, the body of the post, and a post count to put them in order. Finally, I’d have a ‘comments’ table with comment posters userIDs, essayID’s to link them to essay posts, commentID’s to put them in thread mode (if that’s apropriate) and of course the comment body.