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Major Comments Overhaul

John P.

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John P.Ok. Tonight I made some major changes to the way comments are handled on the blog.

  • Added a few ‘quicktags’ to the comment box for text formatting.
  • Added a live preview directly below the comment box.
  • Added threaded commenting. This allows people to respond directly to a previous comment and keeps responses grouped for ease of reading them.
  • Added paged commenting. This way when there are lots of comments on a page they are broken up into 10 comments per page. You can see the older posts by choosing the previous comments pages, or you can still opt to display them all at once.
  • Comments are in reverse order now, meaning most recent comment is first. Again, this should speed things up by allowing people to skip all the old comments and get right to the new ones.
  • The comment box is now resizeable if you have JavaScript enabled. This way you can make it larger if you have a particularly long post.

I’m hoping for some feedback on these changes, so please let me know what you think. Feel free to use this post as a testing ground to see how all the changes work.

John

Comments

  2. Actually, the Feedburner script at the top (with Digg, and the other stuff) is supposed to be displaying the number of comments. It usually takes a little while to update, but it should be saying something by now. I guess it’s possible that the changes I’ve made are incompatible. I’ll wait until tomorrow to see what happens there.

  3. Only suggestion is to have the amount of comments on the front page. It just says “Add comment”. Users like to see how many other people have commented. Makes them want to comment too.

  5. I’m guessing that you are referring to the Strikethrough. Actually it does work once posted, but it doesn’t work in the preview window.

  9. Ok. I’ve changed a few things.

    1. Everything is once again ordered in Ascending order.
    2. I’ve increased the number of comments that appear per page to 25.
    3. I’ve changed it so that the last page of comments is the default page displayed. So if there are 75 comments you automatically see the last 25, but you can scroll back through the previous pages to see older ones or you can still “view all”.

  11. OK. Problem: Every time I tried to reply to the 2nd level nested reply (03:14:11), nothing happened when I pushed Add comment. I just loaded the page, my comment nowhere to be found. Here’s my 3rd try at posting this comment, this time not posting as a reply.
    ——-
    Uh oh. My comment disappeared on the first try. This is the second time I’m posting this.
    ——–

    Do you like it better when the latest comments show up on the top? I think it makes it a bit confusing having replies in old->new order but original comments in new->old order, kind of feels to me like Memento.

    I would also recommend to initially larger textbox size!

  12. Uh oh. My comment disappeared on the first try. This is the second time I’m posting this.
    ——–

    Do you like it better when the latest comments show up on the top? I think it makes it a bit confusing having replies in old->new order but original comments in new->old order, kind of feels to me like Memento.

    I would also recommend to initially larger textbox size!

  13. Do you like it better when the latest comments show up on the top? I think it makes it a bit confusing having replies in old->new order but original comments in new->old order, kind of feels to me like Memento.

    I would also recommend to initially larger textbox size!

  14. Looks good John. Going to post this one, and then a reply to your nested reply above to see the difference. Everything seems to work fine on Safari.

  15. Now I’m replying to the first post. This reply should be nested and grouped with the original comment. It should also update the Comments title to read “2 Comments in 1 Thread”.