Last month, I talked a bit about changes coming to comments. I won’t repeat myself here, except to say that the new layout goes with a change to the story page with the intent to meet these goals:
- Make story pages width responsive so they are readable and usable on every device and screen size, from desktop to phones, and to allow for user control of screen and font magnification, without having wholly separate versions for mobile.
- Make our stories and comments more accessible to people with disabilities and people using assistive technology on the web. (This includes making linked areas large enough for fingers on touch devices and for people with tremors or other fine motor coordination issues, which is part of the WCAG official standard.)
- Integrate into our more modern codebase for improved maintainability and unified site behavior
So now what?
Our solution for comments, which basically expands use of the style we already use for tablets and narrower screens, also solves another problem peculiar to our comments which is:
Extremely
narrow
comments
in deeply
nested
replies,
surrounded
by absurd
amounts of
whitespace.
When you are writing
haiku, line breaks are friendly
but prose wants fewer.
For those of you lucky enough to be unfamiliar with the skyscraper comment, I can share this before and after:
The changes coming to the story page body are not dramatic, but they will allow you to make your browser extremely narrow and still read the text, and have the comments narrow down in tandem. This will benefit people in all screen sizes. We still won’t have the text go infinitely wide, because text gets unreadable if the lines get too long.
In yesterday’s story from Faith Gardner announcing some updates to the Rules of the Road, several people mentioned that they miss the miniprofile that went with usernames on mouseover in the comments. The rationale behind removing that feature last week is in part because hover is not supported for all devices and all users. We’re interested in hearing more from you about whether you miss that feature or whether the click through to the full user page is a change for the better.
These changes do mean that we are approaching end of life on two of our alternative site areas:
- Old style comments. When we transitioned to new comments back in 2019, we allowed users to set a preference that would let them keep the old comments running. It’s been a good long run, but it’s time to retire that code. Sometime in the next week or so, you’ll find yourself using the current comments. If you’d like to start using them now, you can click this link: reset preference to new comments. Helpdesk has instructions for toggling between them. (If your recommend buttons are sharp rectangles, you’re running the old system, and if they are rounded rectangles as above, you’re running the new.)
- The mobile version at https://m.dailykos.com. If you’re a mobile user, you probably get stories from this version by default (though you can set a preference for the full site). Some desktop users also intentionally use the m. version for specific individual reasons. When our new story page is ready, this area will be retired, though I expect it will continue to be available into 2022. Mobile users will all get the full version, and it will be better than our current full version at handling small screens as well as bringing the full functionality to small devices, like properly displaying embeds and giving you a full comment editor, as well as giving access to the ability to flag problem comments.
What about other comment bugs?
Last week I asked you if we’d squashed the intermittent bug around comment recommends mysteriously unsticking and then resticking, and you told me we hadn’t. We were so sad! And it was frustrating because we couldn’t see it happening. But yesterday a team of us managed to figure out how to reproduce it, so I feel confident we’ll have another, stickier fix out shortly.
But the old pages aren’t broken!
We appreciate the sentiment and the appreciation of our old work, and how solid it’s been. The internet changes around us, and standing still isn’t one of the choices — we have to support new browsers, new operating systems, and new net.conventions. The truth is that we’re holding together some of that old code with proprietary bubblegum plus strategic duct tape, and the only brand that has just the right combination of stickiness and viscosity is no longer on the market. It’s best if we replace it before we use up the last pack. The only way through is forward.
Next Steps
The more flexible comment layout with the vertical lines is coming fairly soon. Some small changes have already come through in preparation. If you want to be sure you catch every story discussing changes, I suggest following the Daily Kos Announcements group.
Thanks in advance, everyone, for your thoughtful feedback and patience.