Today we have another dozen or so improvements for beta. This wraps up new features for comments with the addition of key command navigation of the comment tree (to replace “-f [new]” to find unread comments) and better recording of which comments you have read. I hope this set of features presents a good experience reading, writing, moderating and recommending comments. We are now just a couple of weeks from our target launch date. We would love to hear any feedback you have about beta, but we particularly want to know about any bugs you find. Any new feature suggestions will have to wait until after we get the port up and running. Thanks so much to everybody who has kicked the tires at dailykosbeta.com over the summer. Many feature suggestions we received have been implemented, and bugs found have been patched. Its been a really helpful process for us. We’ll be revealing the new beta tester badge soon and awarding it to anybody who provided feedback in comments on beta or at the helpdesk. One change some people have noticed is the transmutation of the sneck. Whereas on the old site the url for a comment in a story would reflect the number of the comment with in the context of the current story like this, on the new site the url reflects the number of the comment in the context of the whole system. What the sneck shall we do? I suggest celebration of any comment with an url ending in two zeros, regardless of what number comment it might be for this particular story. What do you think? Features and enhancements:
- We no longer show the recommend button when a comment is too old to recommend.
- Clicking on the comment icon from the front-page & blogs-page now takes you to story comments.
- When you visit a link to a comment, we show a small popup instead of a spinner-modal.
- We've made major server-side performance improvements to the way we calculate story and user stats.
- From the front-page and blog-sidebar, the comment counts are now [unread]/[total].
- The comment counts on blog pages and at the top of the story page now display the number of comments you have not seen.
- The new-comment indicator (orange dot) only appears next to comments that you have really not seen, instead of only comparing when you last loaded the page.
- Added keyboard shortcuts for comments.
- Contentious comments are now marked with a red underline of the recommend and flag buttons.
- We now display the number of flags a comment received to admins.
- From the story-page, the tag-history now shows in local time.
Bug fixes:
- The page no longer jumps when new comments are added to the page.
- On older stories, editing tags with spaces displayed a message that said "The tag you entered already exists." Fixed.
- From the Community dropdown, the "More..." link takes you to groups now.