tscheese's dashboard

For the last few days, I've been almost completely unable to post on Jezebel. I hit the "submit" button and the comment just vanishes without being posted. For some reason, if I keep trying and refreshing the page, it'll work once in awhile, but nine out of ten times my comments are eaten without getting posted. Jezebel has worked just fine in the past and I'm disappointed. I haven't tried on other sites, but I imagine it's the same.

This morning, I'm also missing the "preview comment" checkbox. Cleared cache/history--this didn't help.

Please respond, Gawker Tech.

IE 7 and Windows XP.

On Jezebel, I've noticed some sporadic problems in the last week. I'm using Windows XP, IE 7. I haven't had these problems with Firefox on my Mac:

-Hitting the "expand" or "reply" arrow on a comment sometimes sends you to the top of the page
-Sometimes I start typing a comment in the comment pane, hit "submit", and the comment is completely eaten into the void. It never gets posted. The comment pane is just blanked out and the comment is gone.
-Sometimes the "Loading comments..." twirly indicator just goes and goes and goes and goes and never actually loads comments.

This isn't any particular thread, either. Everything that's been posted today (3/9/09, morning EST) has had the problem off and on.The only thing that works is refreshing the page until it renders correctly. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I'm getting tired of having my comments eaten.

What gives? Jezebel has worked perfectly in the past.

Jezebel (I haven't checked the other blogs), in Classic View, seems to be collapsing small, one-line comments. I understand the approach--if all you want to do is read more substantial, multi-sentence comments, and you don't want anything else to load, all you have to do is gloss over the one-line comments.

However, there should still be an option to expand all of them, because a lot of things don't seem to be working quite right in the collapsed comments.

-If a single image is posted in a comment, with no other text, the comment will be collapsed. So I have to expand the comment to see what it is.

-If there's a threshold for the minimum number of characters that a comment must have in order to appear in full-text, it's set too high, because the collapsing tends to "cut off" great swathes of comment. Yes, I can always just expand the comment to see what the rest of it says, but I shouldn't have to. If the collapsing system is meant to cause small, inobtrusive comments to be more small and inobtrusive, it should ONLY collapse small comments. I should never have to see an ellipsis and have to click more to satisfy my curiosity.

-It's intrusive and it breaks up the flow of the page. Small, concise one-liners can actually be useful, funny, and witty, but now they're rendered in tiny text without a user icon, as if they're not really part of the discussion.

Obviously none of these things are life-threatening--it doesn't take me more than a second or two to expand a comment--but it's frustrating and cumbersome from a UI standpoint to force your user to take extra steps over something so insignificant.

Please enable an option to "Expand All" in Classic View.