From the diaries. This is a handy guide on how to use the supple new comments, from the guy who designed the ajax parts of it. -ct
The new Daily Kos comments system uses the state-of-the-art
Ajax technology to make reading and contributing to Daily Kos discussions fast, easy, and fun. No longer do you have to suffer through waiting for entire pages to load just because you recommended the diary or gave a comment a rating. Virtually everything can now be done in-place right on the page you're viewing.
Read on for way more details and compatibility information!
There is a new ratings approach for comments in Daily Kos. Gone are the numerical ratings 0-4. In their place is the ability to recommend a comment to other users, just like you recommend diaries. Users gain "mojo" as their comments get recommended, and eventually become "trusted users". Trusted users have a second rating available to them, the "Troll" rating. This allows abusive comments (and their replies) to be hidden. Clicking on a rating selection submits the rating instantly without reloading the page.
The ratings on a comment are displayed in a new format, (RR+/TT-), where RR is the number of comment recommends, and TT is the number of troll ratings. Clicking on this display when it has values will open a panel right above the comment displaying who gave what ratings.
Diary recommendations have also been improved. When you click on the recommend button, the recommendation is sent instantly without reloading the page. You can see who recommended the diary by clicking on "View Recommenders", which opens a pop-up panel above existing page content. If you wish to Unrecommend the diary, you may, however you can't re-recommend once you have unrecommended. A confirmation dialog appears asking if you are sure...no more accidental unrecommends!
The biggest improvements are to the comments themselves, reading and posting them. Each comment now has a disclosure triangle next to it...clicking on the triangle will expand or shrink it. This makes it easy to get a quick overview of comments and their ratings by shrinking the comments, and expanding and reading the ones you are interested in. You can easily set your preferred way of loading the page by clicking "Expand" or "Shrink" in the comment control bar, and then clicking the "Always" button. Your preference is immediately sent to the server. You may also Hide comments Always, which may help if you have poor bandwidth (e.g. dialup) or aren't interested in comments.
An excellent shortcut is the ability to expand or shrink an entire subthread at once. Simply hold down the control key (on Windows/Linux, or the Command key on Mac) while you click on a triangle. The comment and all its replies will be expanded or shrunk. This trick also works to show or hide all the raters on all comments.
Thorns long in the side of Kossites have been gently removed as there should no longer be a way to screw up the layout of a thread by posting huge images or getting in a long back-and-forth. Long comments automatically get their own scroll bars, preventing page hogging. And the infamous "margin race" simply tops out at 15 levels of nesting...replies will just appear unindented deeper than that. It's effortless and in-place to change from indented to flat view, and from wide to narrow view as well.
But perhaps the crown jewel of the new system is the in-place comment editor. This editor appears right on the page when you click "Post A Comment" (to reply to the diary) or "Reply to This" (to reply to an individual comment), right under what you're replying to. You can still view all the other comments on the page (even new ones streaming in via Autorefresh) while you edit. If you decide your reply should be somewhere else, just click on the appropriate link, and your whole editor, with contents intact, will be instantly moved there.
The editor offers helpful buttons which allow you to insert the HTML tags for bold, italic, and blockquotes. The blockquote button will even copy over text you have selected on this page, making it easy to quote part of the diary or another comment. There is a super-helpful link editor which allows you to enter URLs, with labels, and there's a checkbox that makes it easy to paste a URL to an image. Your cat will be famous.
Virtually all of the shortcuts from the old "Autoformat" mode have been preserved, and there are some new ones. For instance, double brackets [[Kossary]] create links to Dkosopedia entries of that name. *Bold*, _italic_ and -strikeout- are also there as well. You can go ahead and paste in HTML without worry (but look carefully at the preview and any errors that the server sends back...the server may reject some tags it doesn't like).
Best of all, the preview feature, containing all of these formatting methods, is downloaded onto the client, so preview is instant. It's so fast, we decided to make it mandatory! There will be no excusses for spelling errors no more. The preview is displayed as a real WYSIWYG version of your comment, just with a green bar over it instead of gray. If it looks good to you, click post and your comment will be instantly posted, without the page reloading. If you'd like to edit it, just scroll down, make your changes, and preview again. (You have to preview again, because if we left the Post button enabled after you make changes, there might be confusion as to which version you're actually posting.)
And the most whiz-bang high-tech feat of derring-do is the Autorefresh feature. This uses Ajax to turn Daily Kos diaries into threaded online chat rooms. It was designed with both live blogging and Armando in mind...no longer do you have to impulsively click your browser's Reload button to see new comments coming into the thread. Just check the Autorefresh box (it's a system-wide preference) and several times a minute updates will stream in, adding their comments, updating ratings and recommenders, all without disturbing what you're doing.
When new comments come in, a little panel slides up in the lower right-hand corner offering links that scroll to view them. It even makes it clear which are replies to your own comments. It is designed to be ignorable but can help direct you to the action. We have just the technology to cover the upcoming impeachment hearings! =)
While many of these features are available to unlogged-in readers, most of them are only available to those with accounts. It's never been a better time to register and join in the fun!
That's what we have for you today, dear Kossians, and I'm sure there are more things to discover that I've simply forgotten about. The compatibility notes are below. And don't blame me for taking away your numerical ratings! That came straight from the boss himself!!! =)
Merry commenting!
peeder
DAILY KOS AJAX COMPATIBILITY
Common Considerations:
The site will look and work much like the old site does with JavaScript disabled, or with browsers that don't support Ajax (old ones, mobile phones like the treo, etc.). This is called "legacy mode". The technology that makes that support so smooth, by the way, has the lovely name "progressive enhancement."
WINDOWS
Recommended Browser: Firefox 1.5
Firefox 1.5/1.07:
- No known issues, but staying up-to-date is recommended
- Some difficult scripting operations may show a dialog asking if you should continue. It's recommended that you do continue as there are no known infinite loop bugs.
- Greasemonkey extension is emphatically NOT supported: if you load that hack onto your browser, uninstall it before reporting problems.
Internet Explorer 6 (Including AOL Explorer and Netscape 8 in IE mode when IE 6 installed):
- Links created with link editor are pasted in at the end of comments. They can of course be moved from there with a cut and paste.
- Animations are disabled
- No comment scrollbars
- Find on page is broken when you Expand a page that was loaded as shrunk. The workaround is to use Expand Always mode.
- Autorefresh may cause periodic "clicking" sounds as it loads (the same sounds as if you were pressing the reload button manually); these can be turned off in the Sounds tab of the Sounds Control Panel: Set the "Start Navigation" sound to "(None)".
- Renders faster than Firefox, but JavaScript is slower
- IE7 beta 2 works much like IE6
Internet Explorer 5.5:
* All IE6 problems. Even so, upgrading is recommended.
Internet Explorer 5.0, Netscape 4 and earlier are all stuck in legacy mode (no Ajax).
Opera 8.5:
- Autorefresh sometimes makes comments disappear, sometimes doesn't work
- Back button may sometimes require numerous presses (use rewind button)
- Parent links on comments in /story mode open an ugly page instead of scrolling up.
- These issues, true for all Opera platforms, will be fixed in Opera 9.x
MACINTOSH
Recommended Browser: Safari
Safari 2.x (on 10.4 Tiger) / 1.3x (on 10.3 Panther):
* No known issues provided Safari is updated via Software Update
Safari 0.x/1.x (Early versions on 10.2 Jaguar):
- These browsers are not supported.
- The site will render, but some links will not be clickable
Firefox 1.5.0.1/1.07/Netscape 7.2:
- Limited to displaying
250 a system-dependent number of expanded comments: more will cause browser to freeze, whether JavaScript on or not.
- No other issues with smaller threads
- Can continue to use provided you either avoid threads with many comments or use Shrink Always mode and never click Expand in a large thread.
- Some difficult scripting operations may show a dialog asking if you should continue. It's recommended that you do continue as there are no known infinite loop bugs.
- Not as fast as Safari, or as pretty.
Camino 1.0:
- Does not have 250 comment limitation of Firefox (even though they claim to use the same Gecko 1.8 engine)
- Will support Ajax usage on 10.2 Jaguar
- Some difficult scripting operations may show a dialog asking if you should continue. It's recommended that you do continue as there are no known infinite loop bugs.
Opera 8.5:
* Same problems as Windows Opera 8.5
Internet Explorer 5.2:
- Uses legacy mode...no Ajax support
- May be best browser for 10.2 Jaguar and earlier
LINUX
Recommended Browser: Firefox 1.5
Firefox 1.5:
- May occasionally display scrollbars on comments that don't need them
- The scrollbar problem occurs far more frequently in earlier Mozilla variants e.g. Firefox 1.07
Konqueror 3.4:
- Appears to work OK
- Some difficult scripting operations may show a dialog asking if you should continue. It's recommended that you do continue as there are no known infinite loop bugs.
[Update] I need some sleep now, but I promise to read every bug report when I awake, and the rest of the crew will as well. Looks like things work. I am overwhelmed by your kind comments. Thanks very, very much.