Journal vroom's Journal: Comments & Moderation Improvements Under Way 21

While reading through your responses to the reader survey from a couple months ago a couple things were clear. You both love & hate comments. You love the insightfulness of our readers, you hate trolls, and there are a number of things currently getting in the way from you being able to navigate through discussions as easily as you might like to.

Load All Comments

The number one thing that kept coming up in comments was an annoyance at not being able to see all the comments right away when you loaded a page. We'd previously made a design decision to show 50 comments to make for a fast page load, while allowing you the user to load more comments. (It should be noted if you login you can change your default view to 250 comments). The major nuissance many of you noted was that if you wanted to load all comments before reading a discussion you'd have to scroll down to the bottom of the discussion & mash on the button multiple times to load the entire conversation & then scroll up to the top to begin reading the discussion. One change we added a week ago or so was a 'Load All Comments' button at the top of the discussion to get around this annoyance.

Number of Initial Comments Shown

Another thing many of you noted was not liking only seeing 50 comments for your initial view. We bumped that number to 80 for an incremental change, and could be further increasing it as we monitor changes to page speed, and other comment dynamics.

Fix for Mod Point Allocation

About a week ago we corrected a bug with mod point allocation which brought a lot of new people into the moderation pool. The number of people moderating, and number of moderations done has gone up significantly as a result of this.

Comment Preview Speed

As part of our comment posting (and submission) processes we have some security checks that take a lot of time. Unfortunately for users many of you spent more time than you needed to waiting for the comment preview to come back while this check was occurring. We recently made a change to do this processing in the background when you trigger a reply form, as a result you should spend less time waiting to preview or submit a comment. Instead of making you wait to preview a comment we're doing processing in the background while you're typing up your comment. We made similar changes to the submit process. There may be further speed improvements later but this is a start, and should be fairly noticeable to frequent commenters.

Comment Threshold Inconsistencies

Another problem that was fixed recently was that comments above your threshold, that were children of lower rated comments didn't always appear. As a result the numbers on the slider for 'Full', 'Abbreviated', and 'Hidden' didn't necessarily reflect what was in the discussion. As of today that should be corrected, surfacing all the comments that should be surfaced by your selected threshold.

More to Come

We're by no means done with improvements to the comment system. Comments are in many ways one of the things that sets Slashdot apart so we want to continue working to make discussions easier to navigate, make interesting comments easier to find, and surfacing the insights within our community that set our community apart from many other places on the web.