User blog:Susanolivia/Improvements to commenting

UPDATE: Things are moving fast here at Wikia! We’re working hard to keep the community up to date with all the changes that are rolling out, so last minute product tweaks are sometimes made after our initial announcements.

We spent a lot of time reasoning out the sort order for comments and our team has decided that while this isn’t necessarily the way everyone prefers to read comments the best choice for the whole community is to show the newest comment first. In order to maintain a cleaner, simpler layout there will not be an option to change this sort order in the current release.

Due to these tweaks we now anticipate that commenting improvements will be ready to roll Wednesday of next week, while our most recent bug fixes will be going live tomorrow.

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We’ve been taking a close look at how the different features and tools on wikis work and improving those that aren’t hitting the mark. With that goal in mind, we’ll be implementing some refinements to commenting next week. We currently have two systems for commenting - one for articles and one for blogs. It didn’t make sense to have two different systems performing the same function on one wiki, so we’ve consolidated them into one super-commenting feature to be used on both blogs and articles.

Here’s a look at some of the changes you can expect:


 * Threaded replies: You’ll now have the ability to add an indented reply directly to a specific comment. Threaded replies to individual comments allow for a better organized flow of conversation.
 * Paginated comments: Large numbers of comments slow down page load times and keep content from appearing quickly. To keep pages running speedily we’ve added pagination to comments. Right now each page can contain 20 comments, and allows for an unlimited number of threaded replies.
 * Comment sort order: To keep conversations engaging and fresh, the default sort order for comments will now be newest first. This mirrors best practices commenting on many other sites around the web including Youtube, CNN.com and Blogger. If you prefer to have comments sorted by newest last, don’t worry - you can adjust that setting to meet your personal preference.

Commenting improvements will be live mid to late next week. Let us know what you think!