Jul 9, 2009 12:15 PM
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Hey, transistor faces. Heads up: we've just made a new comment system that will hopefully (we think) make comments much more readable and allow us to do some cool things. Here's what you need to know.
• There's now a featured comments section. This is what you're going to see by default, and you can click to reveal all comments, like it is now.
• The featured comments section is going to be made up of starred commenters, plus any comments that are especially good from non-star commenters and are promoted inside that post
• Star commenters have the ability to promote other people's comments to the featured section by replying to that comment, or just clicking the promote button—reasoning being that if we think star commenters can make good comments, they know what a good comment looks like
• You'll be able to approve unapproved commenters (they have red boxes around their comments)
One of the things that the new system tries to change is to make the "best" comments show up on the front, rather than just the quickest. The fact that we have multiple pages of comments doesn't change, it's just the question of which ones are visible by default: the ones everyone agrees are intelligent, or the guys who just happened to comment after a post goes up.
Oh, and you can also edit your comment for 15 minutes after you make them.
And the cool stuff we can do?
• Live interviews and Q&A's inside the comment section
• Live chats
• Collaborative photo pools, like a photoshop contest except without the photoshop, and in real time
Plus more stuff you guys will think of once you get familiar with the changes. The site may be a little buggy today—we tested it, but there's no substitute for millions of readers piling on and hitting it with weird use cases. So send your bug reports to tips@gizmodo.com with the subject "Comment bugs", and we'll take a look.
Update: Yeah, as predicted, there are bugs. Just hold out while they're fixed by our tech team.
Send an email to Jason Chen, the author of this post, at jchen@gizmodo.com.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
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