RSS FeedNew Site Features!
We've been working very hard to make the site as user friendly as possible, and for us a large part of this is the comments. Here are some new features recently implemented that might make using the site a little better.
-Subscriptions! You may have noticed a small link near the comments which reads "Subscribe to comments". If enabled, when a user posts a new comment to an article you are subscribed to, an email is shot out to you telling you about it. This email is sent only once until the article is checked, so you don't have to worry about getting a lot of emails if there is heavy commenting on a particular article.
By default you are auto-subscribed to an articles comments when you post to that article. This feature can be changed by going to control panel>article subscriptions.
In article subscriptions you can also view your subscriptions, with the option to remove individual ones or all.
One more new feature is a pretty experimental one, and might change a lot over the next few days. When a comment is posted that is over 750 words in length, it is cropped when displayed, showing only the beginning of the comment. The rest of the comment can be viewed by clicking 'expand comment', and can be collapsed again. It seemed that large comments made it difficult to navigate through the article. Another idea was to make the comments have their own little scrollbars.
Comments on these new features are greatly appreciated; tell us what we can do better, what doesn't work well, and what doesn't work at all. If there is an error, please comment on what browser+version you are using and any text the error might say. We have debugged in FX 2.0 and IE 7 so far.
There are some test comments at the end of this article to demonstrate how the new cropping of comments works.
-Subscriptions! You may have noticed a small link near the comments which reads "Subscribe to comments". If enabled, when a user posts a new comment to an article you are subscribed to, an email is shot out to you telling you about it. This email is sent only once until the article is checked, so you don't have to worry about getting a lot of emails if there is heavy commenting on a particular article.
By default you are auto-subscribed to an articles comments when you post to that article. This feature can be changed by going to control panel>article subscriptions.
In article subscriptions you can also view your subscriptions, with the option to remove individual ones or all.
One more new feature is a pretty experimental one, and might change a lot over the next few days. When a comment is posted that is over 750 words in length, it is cropped when displayed, showing only the beginning of the comment. The rest of the comment can be viewed by clicking 'expand comment', and can be collapsed again. It seemed that large comments made it difficult to navigate through the article. Another idea was to make the comments have their own little scrollbars.
Comments on these new features are greatly appreciated; tell us what we can do better, what doesn't work well, and what doesn't work at all. If there is an error, please comment on what browser+version you are using and any text the error might say. We have debugged in FX 2.0 and IE 7 so far.
There are some test comments at the end of this article to demonstrate how the new cropping of comments works.
Now With More Confusingly Good Than Ever Before!
Well, the good news is that the commenting system is pretty much done. The bad news is that I lost roughly 13 hours coding it. But I think everyone will enjoy it. Some features:
For those that don't know, Ajax is Asynchronous Javascript and XHTML. It basically means I can change elements on a page without a hard refresh. All of the fading effects and "instant" things on this site use AJAX (well the fading is just JS but what it gets from the DB is AJAX).
If you go to an article and aren't logged in, you can still comment; simply type your login info into the appropriate boxes, fill out the comment, and hit the submit button. You will be logged in and your comment will be added.
Here's how this works: the form can tell, on submit, whether your login is correct, whether you filled out the comment at all, and if you've commented in the last 2 minutes. (Unfortunately, it sort of breaks when a comment is made just before the hour turns. You may have to wait 5 minutes in this case).
When you try to submit, it will give you messages to the right of the comment text area, informing you of what is happening. Up to three messages are displayed at once, and the older messages fade out.
The other admins at the site are probably not too impressed with this anymore (we use it in the add article section), but new users might be interested to know that when you type a comment, it's basically what you see is what you get. A new box will display below the last comment on an article as you type. On submission, this preview fades away and you "real" comment is placed on the page in real time. I think Kotaku has something like this but it never seems to work. And, in case you were wondering, yes you CAN use BBCode in comments. It might not display properly in the live preview, but on submit it works itself out.
I have tested this in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0.0.1. The ONLY error I have encountered (well, after fixing all of the others), is in IE7: if you login and post a comment and try to click post again, it will for some reason break and you will be taken to a blank page. If this happens, simply hit back. This is only after logging in and trying to do a second comment; this will not happen once you log in or go to another page. IE simply doesn't give enough error reporting to figure it out right now.
If you have any other problems, you can let me know in the comments of this page (unless they don't work entirely for some reason, in which case you can reach me at d3vkit [at] gmail [dot] com).
Sorry for the long sort of personal post, but I am very excited to have this done, and done well!
Completely AjaxFor those that don't know, Ajax is Asynchronous Javascript and XHTML. It basically means I can change elements on a page without a hard refresh. All of the fading effects and "instant" things on this site use AJAX (well the fading is just JS but what it gets from the DB is AJAX).
Login and PostIf you go to an article and aren't logged in, you can still comment; simply type your login info into the appropriate boxes, fill out the comment, and hit the submit button. You will be logged in and your comment will be added.
Error Checking, So Much Error Checking!Here's how this works: the form can tell, on submit, whether your login is correct, whether you filled out the comment at all, and if you've commented in the last 2 minutes. (Unfortunately, it sort of breaks when a comment is made just before the hour turns. You may have to wait 5 minutes in this case).
When you try to submit, it will give you messages to the right of the comment text area, informing you of what is happening. Up to three messages are displayed at once, and the older messages fade out.
Last, but not least...Live Preview!The other admins at the site are probably not too impressed with this anymore (we use it in the add article section), but new users might be interested to know that when you type a comment, it's basically what you see is what you get. A new box will display below the last comment on an article as you type. On submission, this preview fades away and you "real" comment is placed on the page in real time. I think Kotaku has something like this but it never seems to work. And, in case you were wondering, yes you CAN use BBCode in comments. It might not display properly in the live preview, but on submit it works itself out.
I have tested this in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0.0.1. The ONLY error I have encountered (well, after fixing all of the others), is in IE7: if you login and post a comment and try to click post again, it will for some reason break and you will be taken to a blank page. If this happens, simply hit back. This is only after logging in and trying to do a second comment; this will not happen once you log in or go to another page. IE simply doesn't give enough error reporting to figure it out right now.
If you have any other problems, you can let me know in the comments of this page (unless they don't work entirely for some reason, in which case you can reach me at d3vkit [at] gmail [dot] com).
Sorry for the long sort of personal post, but I am very excited to have this done, and done well!