I don't like this new system, but I know I have to adjust. The comment replies thing just bug me a lot.
2 things as feedback, firstly, why can we not downvote replies? A reply can still contain bad information or be useless.Second, and this is perhaps not really a flaw in the system itself, but rather how it's used. It can sometimes be hard to find actual useful information from the comments, especially on some pages that are a reference to something.Just as an example, earlier this week I was searching for useful tips on the Glory of the Firelands raider achievements, and even though there were useful information there, most of it was down near the bottom with ratings of 4-5, and on many pages there were loads of comments or jokes of varying quality at the top rated much higher than that. I understand that the comments aren't meant to be super-serious and that "banning" jokes is stupid, but when you have to search hard between the jokes to find actual useful information at the bottom of the pages, something is flawed in my opinion. There is of course no perfect way to fix this, since users can vote at their discretion, but for example moderators "helping" comments to reach more suitable levels might be appropriate. At the moment, since it was mentioned moderators can (or well, could) contribute a lot to the rating of comments, it seems they have been making the problem worse, and not better on a lot pages.Some jokes or references is of course fun and a good laugh, but when you have to look hard between them to find the useful information, that's not good.
Just had a talk with Lilith (our web designer) and she's meeting with Koper, so there will be some changes coming this week to it--just a status update for what this morning entailed so far so you guys know we are talking about it!
First of all: if you want your feedback to matter more and/or me to reply to it you will have much greater chances if you explain the reasons why you don't like something and provide examples where the problem can be seen.I also don't reply to positive feedback (there's nothing to reply), to things I already said before, and to things that have already changed (such as the ordering by date).Take a look at my latest replies; chances are I already addressed your concerns.
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Ok, so upshot is that you're not going to be changing the way the comments/replies now work. I won't lie, I'm not particularly happy, but life isn't fair and I guess I might as well deal rather than griping. Very well. The biggest issue at the moment (IMO) is getting the replies re-attached to their parent comments. Doing that would reduce the disjointedness that's one of the main reasons the comments are so unreadable/unusable right now. Do you have any suggestions on how to identify 'parent' comments and their offspring? Once identified, flagging them so a moderator can put them back together is easy.One more concern? You said that if a reply is too long to be a reply, that it should be made into a comment with the original comment quoted/linked in it. Ok, but what if you have information that you wanted the original poster to see? (An update or a correction, for example) Or simply a comment that you wanted to be grouped with the original so people don't have to search through the entire comments to find all information related to one particular comment? Currently the only way to do this is to write your comment, then once you have the link to your comment, post a reply to the ORIGINAL comment with your link in it. Even aside from the inconvenience factor, this increases the load that the databases have to carry. For example, this post contains a list of the NPCs and their future selves. I originally had a reply to his comment with a correction for one particular NPC. Since my reply had links in it, it was apparently separated from his comment and made into one of its own, on the next page. As things stand, he has no way of seeing my post and knowing that he should correct his, nor does anyone reading his post have any way of knowing that I posted that correction. Short of my replying to his post with a link to the correction, how is anyone supposed to know it's there? (I've reported my post to a mod for re-uniting, but it's still a decent example)