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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, @02:50PM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @02:50PM (#472283)

    Look, I get it. No one really knows an effective, standardized, sustainable way to avoid spam and promote high quality comments; thus, many comments are collapsed by default, both for the sake of compactness, and because it's not algorithmically clear that those comments are useful.

    However, it was so useful to be able to recursively expand a thread of discussion as I saw fit. Furthermore, I liked being able to see every comment's subject line, even if that comment was collapsed by default, because an author's judicious use of that subject line made it possible to quickly scan the collapsed thread for meaning; as I recall, the new system might not even show these subject lines unless the parent comment is itself sufficiently "worthy" of display. It makes contributing to the comments pointless; I'm not going to contribute to a website that doesn't even show even a hint of my contribution.

    In my opinion, the subject line should be treated as a kind of "twitter", whereby users are encouraged to distill their full comments down into short abstracts that could stand well on their own. Certainly, the display of comments should go back to what it was: A compact display of the subject lines.

    If you want an improvement to make, it's this: The ability to edit a comment. That is what yields high quality comments, because it is only after submitting that a person sees a typo or conjures an excellent rebuttal.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Monday February 27 2017, @03:35PM

    by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 27 2017, @03:35PM (#472309) Journal

    However, it was so useful to be able to recursively expand a thread of discussion as I saw fit. Furthermore, I liked being able to see every comment's subject line, even if that comment was collapsed by default, because an author's judicious use of that subject line made it possible to quickly scan the collapsed thread for meaning; as I recall, the new system might not even show these subject lines unless the parent comment is itself sufficiently "worthy" of display

    Barring information to the contrary in your comment, I'm going to assume you are reading as an Anonymous Coward (AC). I loaded this story in another browser (IE 11) and not logged in. At the time of writing this, the defaults for an AC load this story with:

       Threshold: 0:25 comments / Breakthrough: 2:15 comments / Mode: Threaded-TOS / Sort: Oldest First

    Notice the "Threaded-TOS"? IIRC, that mode was intended to imitate the prior Improved Threaded model. There is a NEW alternative mode that I think might be closer to what you are asking for. Click on the drop down list box and change the mode from "Threaded-TOS" to "Threaded-TNG". Then click on the "Change" button.

    --
    Wit is intellect, dancing.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @05:59PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @05:59PM (#472408)

    The ability to edit a comment.

    This would be great, but the implimentation doesn't seem easy and it's unclear if/how the original posts should be kept or how to deal with trolls who abuse the edit function.

    only after submitting that a person sees a typo or conjures an excellent rebuttal.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'esprit_de_l'escalier [wikipedia.org]

    • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday February 27 2017, @06:07PM (1 child)

      by Gaaark (41) on Monday February 27 2017, @06:07PM (#472418) Journal

      If you can edit a comment, it's far too likely you'll end up with 'fake news' comments.

      A) Make a comment
      B) Someone says "Hey i like that!"
      A) Change comment to say "I have a biggus dickus!"

      Fake 'news' comment.
      Orange is the new Barack.

      --
      --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
      • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:29AM

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:29AM (#472692) Journal

        An easy solution for this (well, possibly not easy to implement) would be that if you edit a post after it was replied to, the following happens:

        • The previous version of the comment is preserved in the system.
        • The answer gets an automatic warning "This post has been edited after being answered; see the version of $DATE [here](link to previous version).

        More problematic is the question of moderation. On one hand, you don't want to get highly moderated trolls achieved by writing something good, having it moderated up, and then having the text replaced by a troll text. On the other hand, you also don't want to simply remove all old moderation, as that would allow trolls to remove their troll moderation by doing trivial edits (or even adding more troll stuff).

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 2) by Celestial on Monday February 27 2017, @06:11PM (3 children)

      by Celestial (4891) on Monday February 27 2017, @06:11PM (#472422) Journal

      An edit comment function would be great, and the best way to deal with trolls would be to limit the ability to edit a comment to something like 20 minutes. Of course, I have no idea how easy or difficult that would be.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @07:29PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @07:29PM (#472467)

        Or simpler - let logged in users chose the option that they can't post without previewing first, just like us ACs.
        Gives you a chance to look it over before committing and requires practically no code changes.

      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday February 27 2017, @07:59PM

        by bob_super (1357) on Monday February 27 2017, @07:59PM (#472493)

        5 minutes tops, or until replied to.
        Still leave the door open to editing while someone types a reply... Cancelling an edit made less than 2 minutes before a reply might be tough.

      • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Tuesday February 28 2017, @04:08PM

        by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 28 2017, @04:08PM (#472826)

        I think facebook is a 2 minute edit limit, seems to work quite well for correcting typos, less well for sorting out the accidently posted when half-written issue, for that though there is delete-and-redo (copying the content first).

        You would really have to limit replies and moderation in that period though, and if you're going to do that why not just hide the post from everyone else for 2 mins, and if you're doing that why not just have a mandatory preview with a countdown timer to posting. I don't think there is any best answer, it would be interesting to find out how many comments are replied-to/moderated within (say) 2mins - if it's a small percentage then maybe it's not a big issue to allow edit/delete within that period.