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posted by NCommander on Monday February 27 2017, @12:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-knew-there-would-be-pitchforks dept.

Continuation of: Site Update 2/27

So, the recent site update got a lot of news, and comments. Predictably, there was a lot of comments split on the fence both ways. I've been out sick and haven't been actively involved in SN in a few days, but I did review the updated changes on dev before they went out. I'm still not up to responding to you guys personally, and TMB/Paul have had things covered, so I'm just going to write a blanket story. So, let's open this and say THIS ISN'T THE FINAL SET OF HOW THINGS WILL BE. I'm leaving my comments above the fold to make it clear what's going on. I'd put that in a blink tag on if that was still in the HTML standard.

The changes to commenting were primarily driven on technical grounds. To do D1.5, the site had to load a mass load of comments and do server side processing to thread them. To give you an example, on a cold page load, before we apply caching a few points in the site would take over a minute to load, render and thread. The only thing that prevented the site from becoming unusable in 503s is that the frontend has a lot of caching. Even with that, we can't cache every single bit of the site at once. In a "cold cache" scenario such as after a varnish or DB update, the site would be borderline unusable until those caches could be loaded. So let me make this clear that this change wasn't a change for changes sake. There was (and is) a need to revamp the commenting.

We noted that this change was coming in other meta stories, and even had a landing article on dev for people coming to check it out. No one did. How we use commenting on dev and how we use it on production are two different things; you can't realistically test these things in real world conditions without updating production.

As TMB stated, we couldn't get the same behavior without making the site cry in the corner, and this was fairly extensively tested on dev before it went live. For older users to the site, you may remember this is not the first time we've changed comments, and rather predictably, the roll out of Improved Commenting actually was fairly buggy. This is a more drastic update.

Right now, we're going to keep improving and changing things to address as many things as possible. To that extent, there will be a daily article for at least this week if not longer to allow for feedback as we work to make things better. If, at the end of all the tweaking, we can't satisfy the vast majority of folks, a revert remains as an available option. We've built this entire site on listening to the community, and taking their feedback into account. That isn't going to change now. I'm hoping we've earned enough trust from you guys collectively to be allowed to at least experiment for a bit.

I'm going to leave the rest of the article for the dev crew to use. Due to personal real life issues, I'm likely not going to be around much, so if you don't see me, that's why. I have full faith in the staff in helping manage and keep things going.

~ NCommander

Hi! I'm martyb (aka Bytram) your friendly neighborhood QA/test guy chiming in with my 2¢ on the upgrade/rollout.

Firstly, I apologize that you are seeing ANY issues with the site upgrade. I took this update very seriously and was, unfortunately, only able to perform about half of the testing that I wanted to see done before we went live. That said, there are some issues that were reported that I had not foreseen, so this has been a learning experience for me, too.

Secondly, I'd like to point out what you are NOT seeing -- the many MANY changes that TMB and PJ made as a result of feedback arising from testing. That said, comments are THE thing that makes this site. It's not the timeliness or fine writing of the stories — as I see it, this site is all about providing a venue for discussion.

Look past the fold for the rest of my comments.

Though there were a whole lot of tests that I was able to perform, there were many others that I had still not gotten to yet. I apologize that some of you had to scrape your knuckles on some very rough edges that made it through. In preparation for rollout I had written a series of programs to allow me to automate some aspects of submitting comments in different hierarchies which were key in identifying shortcomings in testing the correct operation of the expand/collapse and hide/show features. I was by no means able to perform an exhaustive test of all of the permutations but I was able to catch a number of issues and I'm sure TMB and PJ will attest that I beat on them pretty hard to make some changes. So far, I've seen no comments complaining about those controls functioning as they should, so YAY on that.

What has not been tested, and for which I hereby request the help of the community, are the user preferences whereby one can provide modifiers to certain aspects of comments. To access these, go to your preferences page, and then click on the "Comments" tab.

Here, you will see a set of modifiers grouped under the header: "Points Modification." The comment's actual score remains unchanged, but these modifiers allow you to provide a nudge to different categories so you could, say, favor "Funny" comments by adding +2 to the score calculation, and hiding all comments modded "Offtopic" by changing that modifier to "-6".

The "Reason Modifiers" are:
Insightful Offtopic Spam Interesting Flamebait Disagree Funny Troll Touché Informative Redundant

The "People Modifiers" are:
Friend Fan Foe Freak Friends-of-Friends fof Foes-of-Friends

And so on with modifiers for Anonymous postings, Karma Bonus, New User Modifiers, Small Comment Modifiers, and Long Comment Modifier.

I would appreciate these being explored and verified as to their correct operation. If you choose to help, please mention in the comments which control you tested, and what happened when you set it to -6, -2, +2, and +6.

These values are suggested so as to explore settings that make a given category nearly hidden (a "+5 Interesting" comment with the "Interesting" modifier set to -6 results in an effective score of -1) — set your threshold/breakthrough to 0 and those comments should not be displayed. Conversely, you can set the "Troll" modifier to +6 so even a "-1 Troll" comment would receive an effective score of +5 and should always appear in the comments you see displayed.

Lastly, but of extreme importance in my mind, is how impressed I am by the community feedback. Issues were stated, explained why it was problematic, steps required to reproduce, steps taken as an attempt at a workaround -- THIS is what keeps me going and donating my time to this site. We are working together to make this the best site we can. I'm proud to be a member of this community. Together I'm sure we can get the remaining issues worked out to people's satisfaction. And, as NCommander stated, if we are not able to do so, there is a fallback to the old approach. I must admit that some of the new features were a bit jarring to me (I started reading at the green site before it even had UIDs) so there's some long-practice reading/viewing skills that are being challenged, but overall I'm liking the changes. I hope you do, too.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @04:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @04:46PM (#472352)

    > Fading the comments to the point of being difficult to read

    Better to just have two simple color schemes. New comments can have the regular black on grey text, and the old comments can have black text on a slightly grey.