In our continuing saga of our comment rewrite, I’m once again inviting y’all to give our new code a whirl.
Behind the scenes at Daily Kos HQ, the tech team has been working on a substantial rewrite to the code that drives the site comments. The community that we build via the comments section is one of the most valuable aspects of Daily Kos, but the current comments have a couple of shortcomings:
Long comment sections become unusable, especially for devices without a ton of memory. And more and more people want to access Daily Kos and fully engage the comments from a tablet or phone, in addition to entry level computers. Reading comments should be snappy and fast and easy no matter what device you use or what kind of connection you have. Our desktop comments don’t run on mobile at all, which means we have to support two codebases, and mobile does not get a full feature set.The main new feature is known as “lazy loading.” What this means is that instead of loading all 8,118 comments on page load, the comment tree will only load the 100 or so comments you’re looking at right now, and unload the rest out of your memory. It will anticipate your actions as you scroll, to try to load in comments ahead of you so that the end result feels right and natural — pagination without having to wait or specifically turn a page. What’s really totally freaking awesome about this is that someday soon the 8,118 comment diary I linked to above… will in the near future be completely usable on a phone, even with people actively commenting on it as you read. No longer will we have to abandon great story and comment threads because there are just too many comments to load.
Since then we fixed the two big surprises y’all found, so it should be more fun this time. Thank you to everyone who took the time to characterize what they saw, provide screenshots, etc — it really made a positive difference for us.