As you may have noticed, this week we've been changing the way commenting works on the site.
The tech-literate among you may be interested to learn that the main change is that comments are now handled server-side rather than client-side.
For everyone else, this means that we're not using javascript to display comments anymore, which brings with it a whole sheaf of improvements (such as speed of loading, accessibility and more compatible with normal web things like using ctrl+f to search for a word in a page, or using page up/down), as well as a number of interesting new challenges.
One of our development team has written a great blogpost about the tech changes, why we made them and how it has been implemented, and he'll post that in the next day or so. But in the meantime, we need your help.
With any site-wide functionality change, there are bound to be some bugs and usability issues which need ironing out in the first few days after launch. This is unfortunate but on a site this big and with so many users hammering the commenting system simultaneously, it's not always possible to reproduce live-site conditions in the development environment, so some glitches only pop up after launch.
With your help and feedback so far (thanks!), we've noticed a few things, and our tech team are working on fixes as I write:
- Some inconsistencies with recent comments appearing/disappearing when you refresh the page or go back/forward
- Some strangeness around the speed of posted comments appearing - or rather how quickly that person can see their own comment (this is to do with caching issues, and isn't happening because comments are being premoderated, as some people have assumed)
- Blank and duplicate comments appearing in the thread
- Problems with liveblog comments opening in new window
We also know there are a couple of navigation/usability things which need fixing (like the ability to post a comment from the bottom of a thread as well as the top) and I'm told those should be resolved very soon - maybe even by the time I've finished writing this post!
If you spot any other weirdness or things that look like bugs in this vein, it would be very helpful if you could let us know (in the comments below - oh, the irony) exactly what you've spotted or experienced (with links, if possible), what happened, what you were doing immediately beforehand (e.g. had you just reloaded the page? Or posted a comment?) and that should help us to track down the bug and fix it.
We're hoping things will be sorted out so that the commenting functionality works properly and without problems really soon. In the meantime, I realise it's frustrating, but please be patient while we work through this - and if you can't be patient, then please be constructive. Thanks.
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