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.
Last week’s diary is here: www.dailykos.com/…
I promise every comment in that diary was read, and that every one in this diary will be read too. We added many items to our to-do list from the comments. I can’t promise that we’ll do everything that you ask, but it will be noted and considered.
Our new version is not yet available for phones — those will still go to the old m. codebase that displays a simplified version of the site. But once we’re confident these are working well on the desktop, we’ll be retiring the separate mobile codebase and these comments will be there.
With a little magic, we are able to run the new comments and the old comments simultaneously, and you can choose to turn them on and off.
To turn the new comments ON, visit this URL:
https://www.dailykos.com/comments_beta/true
To turn them OFF, visit this URL:
https://www.dailykos.com/comments_beta/false
These links set a cookie that will remember your preference on a desktop or tablet device for that specific browser. (You can’t view them usefully on a phone yet, sorry.) You can use different browsers or an incognito/private window to see old and new side by side.
Your comments will be saved etc exactly the same in both. Note however that they track which comments are read differently, so when you switch over, it will think all comments are unread.
I have been using the new comments exclusively for a few months as we shake out the bugs and finalize all the features.
Mostly the look and feel of these comments is meant to be similar to what you know and love. There are some small changes to the font size and the design based on user feedback. We know it will be jarring at first.
Some of the changes we hope you’ll appreciate:
For the most part, the rest of things should act pretty much the same. We have a few known issues we’re still cleaning up (especially on the single comment page), but we wanted to get community feedback on the main feature set before we polish every last bit. At this point we have both more and fewer than last week, following the logic of all software releases.
Let us know what you think. You can give feedback in the comments below or at the helpdesk (which for example has an option for private feedback, and doesn’t require an account, if that works better for you). If it’s relevant to your comment, it can be helpful to know what browser and device you’re using and anything special about your setup (like maybe that you use a tablet in portrait mode with a keyboard, or are using a screen reader, or that you’re connecting from Antarctica).
Thanks all for helping us make Daily Kos a better experience for everyone!