Comment System Updates

We’ve been working hard on this one and finally made a tiny bit of progress.

You will find that comments are now nested.  We can see there are some slight visual issues, but we’re working on it. Please be patient with us.
Another edition you will find is the “report” button. If you find comments offensive, click that button to let us know.

Again, we’re still working through this and have a decent list of quirks that need worked out but it seems to be mostly functional.

88 thoughts on “Comment System Updates

      1. It would require some coding, but maybe you could support more nesting with a panning interface. By default, you show 3 levels of dialog, if a user wants more, they must “pan” to further levels, which removes the higher levels of dialog. For inspiration, something like the column view used in the Mac OS X Finder or Thunar. That would be pretty sexy :)

      2. @Caleb

        Why not change the theme to scale in width to fill the whole width of my browser, right now it takes up the middle 1/3rd on my 1280×1024 full screen chrome.

        if it the whole page were wider, the comments could nest deeper. Also less indentation per level would help too.

  1. Hmm, is there a reason to not display the reply button on posts at the nest threshold? Even if you don’t scoot subsequent replies over you could still position them directly under the comments being responded to. As long as people quote those that they’re replying to, I wouldn’t think it would get too confusing.

  2. Not sure if it’s related, but the right-side panel is now blank when viewing the individual posts. That, and just now noticed while typing this message that the text box is rather wide and causes the left-side panel to scroll left & right, without an actual scroll bar.

      1. yes the right sidebar seems to be named #bloginfo

        which is still not there.

        are you modifying the css directly or just messing with
        a plugin? if you need some help let me know and I’ll eamil
        you directly…

  3. well now that nobody is commenting on articles any more except to say “wow this is a great new had” really is nested needed?

    also the input box for txt is getting cut off in firefox so only about 1/2 the line is visible. this is on a 1920×1080 screen full screen browser so i do not think the resolution is causing this.

  4. Widening the comment area could help out a bit with the nesting, even allow another level or 2. I’ve always thought one level was too narrow for me anyway.

    But neat otherwise, helps keep track of conversations instead of digging through to find @replies.

  5. Cool :)

    Another nice addition would be if the submission of the comment was all AJAXY.

    [It would be nice to be able to post a comment while a video is playing ;) Especially since most posts on HaD include a vid.

  6. There are definitely a bunch of style issues but overall I think it’s pretty sweet. Having simple JavaScript to expand/hide replies would be fantastic. I highly recommend you do something in reddit’s comment style.

  7. Ah one more thing, how about the headline of a comment takes 1 line and in one colour instead of 2 lines with 2 colours? Now it’s a little bit hard to see the actual comments between headers.

    e.g.
    July 29, 2011 at 3:30pm svofski says:

    1. I was thinking the same thing. Maybe even right justify the date and reply/report links.

      It’s already way nicer than having to search for the comment someone is replying to.

  8. NICE, hey no worries guys, KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK i have been following hackaday since the beginning and i love that the the green and black has never changed … things like reply and little html changes like this are excellent

  9. First thoughts: nice idea.

    However, style is an issue here. The horizontal line after a post can be misleading when it is followed by nested comments. Also after that nested comment, a line is missing, so it seems to be connected to the following comment.

    Also, like svofski said, having the date on the same line as the name would be great. I personally find the Reply/Report comment buttons to be visually disturbing, as they first seem to be the same as names/dates by their color and width. Maybe you could put them aligned right next to the name and date, or at least align them right?

    Keep up the good work.

  10. A welcome step in the right direction!

    It may be easier said than done, but now would be a really good time to look into changing the “fixed width” format of the site so it instead uses the full width of the viewers’ browser window. That will fix the narrow deep replies, and probably also the text cutoff some people are experiencing. (I use Chrome and lose no text, but sometimes get only a sliver of an embedded Youtube video.)

  11. ..and if you change your user agent string to include “troll”, then there’s also a “sucks” button, and a “this is not a hack” as well as “where’s the arduino?”, “what? no build details?” and a handy “the write-up didn’t include any source code”.

  12. I’m very excited to see the finished product after all the kinks and minor tweaks are worked out.
    This is huge for having comprehensible discussions.
    Way to go HaD!

  13. Has the exact date/time and direct comment link always been there? That’s nice. All in all a good update!

    If I click notify of follow-up comments, will it email me only if people reply to this comment, or if someone comments on the entire post? ‘Cause it would be nice to be emailed only with direct comments.

  14. In the end most of use will get used to the new, and it’s not going to matter. Any because of the new system, we may not read anything from who cant cope, great. :) While Hackaday can address many of their concerns, unfortunately they can address any “trolling” of other web pages that may or may not occur by Hackaday readers of what news Hackaday reports. In any event thanks for the extra efforts Hackaday.

  15. I just now noticed that after the first ~58 comments, it makes another page – you have to click a small “Newer Comments” link to see the rest.

    Was this intended? It seems undesirable…HaD comments used to just go on forever, IIRC.

  16. Other suggestions (’cause I don’t know where else to send them to HAD):

    In the forum:

    1. I swear the “view new posts” changes it’s search parameters. Sometimes it appears to look back at an entire day and sometimes you think it’s only looking back one hour.

    2. Why not add a “no responses to this post yet” button in the “search” forum web page.

    3. Lots of forums lack this one and I don’t know why. Add a status button only available to the O.P. to indicate a thread is “SOLVED” or “PROJECT FINISHED” or “THANKS FOR THE HELP”.

    4. Finally, I don’t subscribe to postings here on the front HAD page any more ’cause the follow-ups are full of noise (like this one :)). But mostly because un-subscribing is now nearly impossible! Perhaps I lost a cookie, or login credentials or it’s just broken beyond (ordinary people’s) fixing (capabilities). What ever the reason – this is your “front room” where you make “first impressions”. Could you have a look around please and see if the doggy has been doing his business in the corner or something?

    1. (Let’s try this reply feature out.)

      I should say 1, 2 & 3 are about the forum and 4 is about subscribing to the comments about the HAD articles.

      ooh, and on my browser (firefox) it might be nicer to add a little space between “Reply” and “Report comments”. Or even have them on opposite sides of the comment box.

      Nice work HAD.

  17. Suggestions:
    Have replies hidden and expandable with javascript. An interesting idea would be to have the replies open in an overlay that would extend to the screen width. This would allow more nesting.

    Also allow there to be a separate selection for replies and follow-up comments.

  18. Suggestion:
    How about putting some space between the two links “Reply” and “Report comment” for not accidentally hitting “Report comment” when someone wants to “Reply”?

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