Today, we’ve replaced the existing Daily Kos commenting system with new comments that… look remarkably like the old ones. We in tech are extremely excited about this. For us, it’s the end of a long project to modernize some code and make it easier to maintain and improve. But what’s in it for you?
Faster loading time and less bandwidth for stories with long comment threads. Less memory overhead for long comment threads, meaning no comment section should ever become too long to read on any device A near-future where commenting on the mobile site will have all the features of desktop A narrow view option that is still readable. Recommend count and total comment count now updates on autorefresh Comment recommend counts update on autorefresh Keyboard-only submit for comments, now fully supported Comment text will be locally autosaved while you draft it — so if your browser crashes, your unfinished comment will still be there on reload An open, unfinished reply will re-center if you start typing again, instead of you losing your place A more obvious marker for the story author in comments Fold/unfold comment triangle moved back to the left side We’ve swapped the key commands so that j/k (lowercase) are now next and previous comment, and shift-J/shift-K (uppercase) are now next unread/previous unread. Change is hard, but this seems to be much more natural and usable for our test users after getting used to it.We’ve added a key command 1 to go to the first comment in the story, and 2 to go to the last comment in the story.
The issue of the long comment threads is the biggest and most important part of this release. Depending on the type of device or computer you have, stories with over 500 comments can get very difficult to load and read. On a phone that number could be as low as 200. This prevents people from participating in long, active comment threads.
The new software does a mostly invisible paging, with an infinite scroll, to let you access all the comments — even thousands of comments — without annoying page breaks. We have tested a story with nearly 10,000 comments on some very tiny devices, even phones, while new comments were being posted to it, and they are completely readable and usable. It’s much better memory management that should result in lower bandwidth and less memory use when you read Daily Kos, wherever you read it. For people using lightweight, portable hardware, this should make the site much more accessible. Remarkably, it should still work to let you jump to the next unread comment or to a new comment that has just arrived, even in a very long thread.
Right between the bottom of the story and the first comment, there are preference settings for comments and a list of key commands for navigating comments without a mouse. Try ‘em out!