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Threaded Comments Disabled
Due to the sizable amount of negative e-mail received on the threaded comments experiment, they have been disabled.
I recommend that if you want to respond directly to a person in the comments section, do one or more of the following:
1. Quote the person.
2. Start your comment with “@commenter’s name:”. So if the original comment is from myself, T-Steel, and you wanted to respond directly, you would type at the beginning of the comment:
@T-Steel:
Thanks for the feedback!
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15 Responses to “Threaded Comments Disabled”
Well, that didn't seem to take very long huh? Thanks for the experiment T-Steel, it was worth a try!
Who was complaining and what were the issues? I thought it was great!
It must have been all those “left-wingers”, Jazz. TMV has only 5 conservatives.
Received a total of 98 negative reviews of threaded comments. LOL! Mainly from people who read the comments, don't reply, but love the conversations. Received 5 positive reviews. Majority rules Jazz.
I liked them too (threaded comments). But it's hard in Blogtopia. Can't afford to lose traffic.
Up until now I didn't offer an opinion one way or another….
At first I didn't care for the change… I was happy to sort the comments by age so I could go straight to where I left off…
But I”m flexible (at least about this) and grew (really quickly) to like the threaded comments.
I'm going to miss them.
If I had known there was a vote I would have voted in favor of the threaded comments. I didn't know a decision was going to come so quickly…
Can we have a recount?
TS, do what you want, but here is a point of argument to think about while munching on your BBQ Island recipes…….
If “conversations” are the attraction to the blog, then why do the folks who don't converse (publicly) get to hold sway?
I say you run a new vote, but you have to cast your vote by post. Come on out of the closet, folks.
Good point CO. I'm not saying they are gone for good. Threaded comments are still on the plate. Once I do a few changes to TMV's sidebars, I think threaded comments will look even better (and work more clearly).
T_Steel – I agree that letting the 'lurkers' decide doesn't seem too fair, but I understand majority rules.
However, I think you were too quick to pull the trigger. This was a change, and a fairly big one. It takes most people time to get over initial resistance to change, even change for the better. I think you should give it a week, then hold a vote (one per ID, I guess, try to stop spoofing if possible), and then see the results.
Thoughts?
I'd like to vote by absentee ballot… I vote YES! Keep the threaded comments.
I'd be more than happy to vote when given the chance.
This is a tough site to have conversations on. Because of the frequency and square-inch-age of new posts, topics disappear from the home page and get hard to find after about a day. If you do click through to a comments page, you have to fish for the latest comments amid 17 vertical feet of nav bar (measured on my monitor). Then on any active topic, it's not clear who's talking to whom. The threaded comments were a help on at least the last point, though they made it even harder to figure out if there were any new comments.
According to http://www.quantcast.com/themoderatevoice.com, many people stop in here, but the core audience is negligible. Compare with americablog.com or dailykos.com, where 46% and 50% of visitors are regulars.
I'd recommend cultivating a regular audience with site features that encourage more participation.
Thanks for working on this T. I'm flexible too- I like the general idea of the threaded comments but several features of it weren't functional or user friendly IMO- mainly the inability to find new comments. If you decide to reimplement, I wonder if it's possible to highlight the new ones somehow.
And then there were a few threads that went to the point that the reply button was missing as the column became more narrow (though Jazz said that this was actually you sabotaging my ability to reply
)
Anyway, thanks again for taking the time to make the changes, and to post about it so everyone can air their preferences.
i detest threaded comments!
thanks!
dear Tyrone
maybe there will be an even more easy to follow version of threaded comments not too far down the road. Somewhere I saw one where the avatar (Is that the right word?) of the comment being responded to was in a header over the responder's comment, saying something like: X replies to Y. (with the little pictures and bylines in the place of X and Y)
I appreciate the experiments.
dr.e
I liked the threaded comments but in very large threads they became unwieldy. I'm good either way.
I, too, liked the threaded comments but found them more of a hindrance in very long threads. As others have said, if there were a way to highlight the latest / most recent, it would perhaps help.
Or maybe a toggle / option to switch between time-stamp priority and threading? We have options now for newest / oldest first (for instance)…?