Kevin's dashboard

When you first made these changes, you acted as if you were open to feedback and willing to listen to the readers. Clearly that isn't the case. One of my favorite things to do on a news site is read the comments. It is awkward (only shows a "few" unless you click a link which then takes you from the story) and it is BACKWARDS. Many people reply to other posts, almost making it like a book as the ongoing discussion grows. Do you read books backwards?

You could at least offer OPTIONS: Let the user decide what order to display comments, how many per page, show the entire story on one page by default, all comments display on the same page as the story, etc. This isn't difficult to allow these types of options these days, and that way EVERYONE might be a little happier.

Granted, others have problems with other parts of your layout, but I don't care too much about that. I get your headlines on my homepage via RSS and click on stories I like then back out to my homepage unless I see another story that interests me, so main site navigation (or difficulty in doing so) doesn't concern me. But there is NOTHING I like about the way you did the comments. I found out that Topix still provides the top stories AND has the nicer implemented comments section.and I have been finding myself just going straight to their site for my news lately. Is this what you wanted?

It's bad enough that one needs to sign up with your site now before we can even post a message. At least make use of that and also allow the user to customize how things appear (as suggested above) once they are signed in.

While the new look is overall an improvement, I must say that I preferred the topix commenting system you used to use. 1) I think it is easier to read comments when they are in order (particularly when people reply to other posts, which they often do). Most sites do it the way you are doing now (newer first) and while that alone is okay if everyone simply leaves a comment, as mentioned above, many people reply to comments, making it a hard read. 2) I liked the ability to reply to a post with a quote. I know this probably encouraged flame wars, but to be honest with you, that's half of what kept me coming back to your site and stories. While I very rarely commented at all myself, it often made for some entertaining reading! 3) Topix made it easy to see all ongoing comments on various stories, which was nice. 4) I agree with what others have said... it's a bummer to have to create an account in order to comment, and will greatly reduce the number of comments on your stories.... one of the highlights of the Trib that I used to enjoy. I actually preferred to read stories on the Trib just because the anonymous comments made for more comments to read (through Topix).

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Order of comments.