Well, it runs with the speed and elegance of a fat jogger at the moment. But a specific problem is that when I've posted a comment the page has automatically refreshed and then the damn thing hasn't been there. It appears later on. I have no idea why, or what I've done to cause this. If indeed I have caused this. Because it's happened on every thread I've tried so far. But then I don't work in IT.

Also, recommending stuff doesn't work all the time.

Apart from that, it takes hideous amounts of time to load all the comments. And it's deeply, deeply annoying having to scroll all the way to the top of the page to make a comment - because of the monstrous loading time, pressing Home or End is about as much use as a fart in a thunderstorm.

Think that's all for now. Keep up the good work!

Thanks for letting us know, unexceptional.

Can you just detail what operating system and browser you're using? Because the speed of loading should be much faster, not slower than before.

There's a fix underway which will enable posting comments from the bottom of a thread. This should be live by tomorrow morning.

server-side rather than client-side.

I would say non-sided at the moment.

I hit "Post a Comment" at the bottom of the page, nothing happened, hit the button at the top of the page, and I got the comment window. Last time, that generated a blank comment. Let's see if that happens again.
Windows Vista, Explorer7, no problems with speed of access.

Sorry - I should clarify - no problems when using the top comment button - it's just the link at the bottom of the page that seems to be causing me problems.

I suspect I'm going to sound like an old git here - but I really don't mean to. I thought CiF was broken. It appears now by design that the pagination has been removed, necessitating a reload of the total number of posts each time I post a new one. I was in a thread with around 900 posts when the change occurred and the load time was soporific to say the least. Is the method I have experienced intentional, because it seems rather strange (or is the slow response a temporary phenomenon)?

Previously, I didn't have to wait so long for pages to refresh, and I can't understand the logic of speeding up the server response only to place far greater demand on it. If you have sped up the delivery system (and I'm glad to see the back of the Java implementation), surely more benefit would be felt by loading a subset of the thread rather than the whole thing?

I look forward to the blog from the designer. Perhaps the reasoning behind the changes will become clearer then.

IE8, Windows Vista.

Like others, I'll be interested in the blog post too.

A couple of things:

1. the "post a comment" link at the bottom appears to transfer you to the top of the page, where you then click on a btton, which then opens up the familiar comment box, and then click another "Post your comment box". All a little frustrating. Why not just put a text-box at the bottom of the page or something?

2. The "go to all comments" link. As far as I can tell, this is implemented by the page progressively loading in the background? So for example you can press the "end" button, the scroll-bar will show you at the end, and will then jump back into the middle while the rest of the page is still loading. In total, the current 900+ comment religion thread took about 30 -40 seconds to load fully. on a 56 MBit/Second WLAN. But of course, I could start reading almost immediately, so long as I didn't much around with the scrollbar or the "end" button.

Not bad performance, considering the size. But why bother? Have the courage of your convictions, and just turn off that link for threads over a certain size. Nobody can read that much at one go anyway.

And may I also abuse this short window of attention to remind you about an edit function? I know it requires a complete redesign and is a major pain in the bum to implement, but it's been - by my count - by far the most commonly requested feature.

But thanks for keeping at it.

I can now comment using konqueror the KDE browser, so I'm happy.

Great news! I've noticed that when I search comments, links within those comments appear all jumbled up on the search results page (though they are fine in the comment if you click through).

This search should illustrate the problem.

If you are looking for bugs the "Post a comment" link at the bottom of the page doesn't do anything for me or my browser. I'm a Chrome 4.0.213.1

The server-side comments mean that all CiF comments will be indexed by Google again!

How about having a "preview" button just before the "Post your comment" one, so you can check out you have done the HTML correctly?

Also, comments take a while to appear. So you enter your comment and then it's not there.

I bet you get lots of multi-posted messages.

I think it's slower, and sends you on merry dance if you click the post comment link at the bottom, even though that was the most logical place to have the comment box.

I also preferred it when you could select different pages of comments.

It's all a bit unwieldy really, but seeing as this has attracted all of 9 comments I suppose most people don't give a shit.

It would have been helpful to have this thread up and well advertised before you began altering the format, people have been commenting about it on RR recently or wondering about their machines/internet connections.

It certainly works better with XP/Firefox now, beforehand the 700+ comments threads really weighed my machine down, now the cache remains unloaded, though it still takes up to half a minute to load all comments. But once they are loaded, the rest is much faster. It still remans to be seen what happens on the 1000+ threads though, I suspect the time required to post and refresh the entire list may defeat my desire to comment at that stage of a thread.

I seem to remember briefly seeing a "last fifty comments" button, now it's "show all comments and jump to the bottom". I suppose when comments are being posted rapidly it's very hard to run a "last fifty" feature, and the way the threads now work is the same as the old pre-pagination system, which I preferred. So probably best to drop the whole pagination thing, even if it means some of us with less rapid machines dropping out around the 800 comment mark.

I notice the "time since post" feature seems to be gone, I won't really miss that one I guess.

One thing I've suggested before would be nice, especially given that one now needs to load or refresh entire lists of comments; that would be to add a comments counter to the profile page, perhaps on clippings, so I could see when new comments are up on threads I've been following.

Ctl. F certainly works more reliably.

Firefox 3.0.15 - opensuse 11.1

I started to post a comment on 'what do you want to talk about' this morning. Then I clicked the 'go back one page' button which normally exits without posting the comment. However, the comment was posted as blank text.

Using Safari for Windows on a 2yo, 2GB RAM PC on XP.

I agreed that the the bottom-of-page Post A Comment merely being a disguised 'Back To Top' is a minor irritant. Of more concern is the fact that on refreshing the page or posting a comment, the most recent 3or4 comments appear to disappear for a few minutes until a further refresh. (Gawd, that's awful syntax isn't it? Sorry!) On fast-moving threads that really will be a 'conversation' killer.

Otherwise, much, MUCH faster, so a tick for that.

Another blogger thought that Refresh was taking you back to the part of a page last read - I couldn't say I found that with any consistency, but if it is the case, a tick for that too. Perhaps a techie can confirm?

And the biggest tick of all will be if the CtrlF count goes back to being accurate, instead of double- or even triple-counting the real number of occasions a searched word is there. I'll let you know after tonight's Readers Recommend Songs Midnight Feeding Frenzy!

I'm a complete techno-thicky, so I'm failing to get my head around what malcolmcoles is trying to tell me.

Is he saying that, for instance, if I now wanted to print a thread and all its comments, I can do? (Can't try that at the mo - I'm now on my 4yo laptop, which doesn't like the revamp very much, but then this machine doesn't like ANYTHING very much.)

No, Refresh is a pain. It's actually randomly varying how many (already-made-&-read) comments are appearing each time. You MUST fix that.

Because of that, I am missing the 'time since' function against each comment. Confusion, retraction, apologies and double-posting are going to be rife if that one isn't sorted out.

This is silly. When I hit 'Post' on my last comment, it appeared instantly on Refresh. I hit Refresh again one minute later, and ALL of my comments this morning are gone!

PLEASE sort this one out before the RR MFF tonight, PLEASE!!!

Morning.

I haven't yet managed to post a comment in the medium of interpretative dance (i.e. no text) and have been both using the 'direct' link at the bottom of the page to get back to the top and click on the 'post a comment' button, and the 'button' directly. Also have not yet had any duplicate comments. When I do post a comment, the page reloads without showing my comment, and it takes one or two (or four) refreshes to see it.

Am using *spit* Windows Vista and Internet Explorer, if that helps identify the problem for people who are getting blank or duplicate comments.

There was mention before of eventually us being able to opt for pagination, which I hope you will do, as that is the easiest way for me to navigate back to where I left a thread - while 'show last' is OK on a relatively slow-moving thread, on some of the behemoths, or where I last checked in some time ago, there can be a lot of new comments to read and I would prefer the page option if you can build that in somehow.

On a side note, Radio4 online reception is shafted at the minute, don't suppose that's anything to do with you chaps? No, thought not. Damnit.

Ah - that time I didn't need to refresh for my comment to appear.

But that time I did.
And the first time I posted this I got to a 'sorry' page.

Now ten refreshes isn't getting my last comment up. Anyway.

WDYWTTA thread has 'reset' itself to last post at 7am, so all the posts thereafter seems to have gone.

DarceysDad

Perhaps we should petition Paul to give us a 'Technology That Doesn't Work Properly' theme this week.

You're on, englishhermit, you're on!

?

Ah!

On my screen now, there's a question mark at the end of my last comment. What I actually typed was a smiley from Character Map. They used to work before the upgrade, and need to continue to do so with things like accented letters - e.g. Sigur Rós' last album title með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust - let's test that, shall we?

Given the current state of affairs (Refresh just lost all comments since 0853hrs) can we have the message 'Your Comment Was Posted Successfully' back, please?

It's loading much faster than before and going back to the point I last reached on the blog, both good things (Windows Vista/Firefox).

However, I am still being forced to log in almost every time I want to post a comment, even thougn I have "Remember me" ticked. This isn't my computer settings as, on other sites (Songkick, Facebook), I almost never get logged out, even after a reboot.

This is horrible. I hate it. There will be no more comments from me until something resembling the old system is reinstated.

Having worked in IT and having been involved in the implementation of many systems, my experience is that there will always be hiccups of one sort or another. The key thing to to do is to ensure that the users of the system are aware of this in advance, not after the implementation, otherwise you end up with users who lose faith in the system.

BTW, I see little point in providing an edit function. Changing comments mid discussion could destroy the flow of the thread.

Still not working properly. My last comment has appeared in englishhermit's comments but not on this thread. I think I'll let you get on with sorting it and come back after lunch to see how you are getting on.

Looks like it is an intermittent fault. That is the worst type of bug to fix. My deepest sympathy. I'll let you get on with it now.

Er ... I just sent gordonimmel a text to tell him about the upgrade. His response?
"I've seen it..... then my computer crashed!"

I think many people will miss the option of loading one page at a time. If the comments are now taking up less memory, then maybe a 'page' can be 100-200 comments instead of 50 ? It would be a shame for a thread to lose people once it got too tiresome to load and refresh a large number of comments.

...and that comment came up straight away. IE7 on my work computer which is a few years old and runs Windows XP.

I have faith, The Guardian is my friend, hope it's fixed soon.

How about a preview function, if we can't have edit? Or a spell check?At least we could see where bold, blockquote etc are going.

Please (x100) bring page the ability to click on the individual page numbers. I feel lost :(

Heresiarch

This is horrible. I hate it. There will be no more comments from me until something resembling the old system is reinstated.

Just to clarify - do you mean the recent old system (June 2008 - October 2009) or the old old system (c2004-June 2008)?

This new implementation is a lot more like the pre-June version (no pagination, serverside, searchable, etc)

...although my comment above, saying the previous comment had appeared straight away, didn't appear straight away, it took a few minutes.

Thanks for all your bug reports - and your patience while we iron out the issues.

Our tech team are reviewing this thread regularly, so it really is very helpful to hear your issues (and when it works, too).

Three quick points re: things that have been mentioned upthread:

Editing: for the reasons englishhermit outlines, editing is unlikely to be added to commenting functionality. But preview is a distinct possiblity.

Feedback: we'll try and restore the feedback screen (the one that says "your comment has been posted") which should help a bit

Pagination: when we introduced pagination back in June 2008, there was quite a negative reaction from a portion of users. Pagination also caused conversations to be a bit Groundhog Day - on page seven, someone would answer a question and on page nine someone would ask it again, for example - plus the javascript loading made it difficult to link to/reference individual comments, print the full page, load in non-standard broswers etc.

For all of these reasons, we opted to make this version unpaginated; making it much more like the previous implementation of commenting functionality, in fact.

However, since the average number of comments per thread has gone up significantly since June 2008 (yay!), it's clear we're going to have to revisit that decision in coming iterations. What works for threads of 1-500 comments might not work so well for 501-infinity. It sounds like a personal preference, with threshold per page set by the user might be an interesting and acceptable way to solve this. We'll look into it after the immediate bugfixes.

Thanks & keep it coming - I'll keep passing your reports on to the tech team.

I've just popped back to where there are 873 comments: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/oct/29/readers-recommend-moon-songs?showallcomments=true#comment-51

IE7 took 30 secs to say it had loaded it (it says "Done" in the bottom left corner), but the page won't scroll or respond to clicking anywhere; the screen goes white and eventually loads properly after a further 45 secs - so more than a minute to load.

I know IE7 is a bit rubbish but a lot of people use it. It doesn't feel very neat to have to load the full weight of comments on an active blog every time. Ideally we'd have the option to either load all the comments (eg. if we want to do a page search on the whole thing), OR to load pages - or at least to load the most recent chunk. Yours hopefully x

Thanks MegPickard. Being able to choose how many comments to load at once would be very neat, and adaptable according to one's computer.

Although I'm not sure about the "Groundhog Day" issue. Isn't that usually more about the individual and whether they're willing to check back over a busy blog, regardless of whether it's on the same page ?

Thanks Meg.

Re: the issue of latest comments not being visible the first time you load (or reload) a page, and this being something to do with a 'cache' (can you tell I'm not that IT-literate?) would my display be helped by me doing something about my 'cache' on my computer? If any IT-types could advise whether or not this would help, and how I would clean it, ot whatever, I'd be very grateful...

...Still working on the bits which cause people to post things twice, I see...;-)

I think I'd do without pagination quite happily, it was always a pain searching for remarks. I think with the paginated version people tended to jump in at the top of the actual page, whereas with "show all comments" there's more of a chance they'll read from the top. Until there are 300+, of course.

Thanks - still working on things here.

Thanks all for all your feedback. We're working on restoring the second 'Post a comment' button asap and on the strangeness of comments not appearing immediately after they are posted.
I'll keep you updated with our progress.

I'm sure most of the bugs have been reported (including the double action required to post a comment if you use the link at the end of the comments) but I'd like to add something about the pagination.

The Readers Recommend blog regularly hits the 1,000 comment mark these days. When the number got high and the comments slowed down I would switch from all comments to the last page only, saving loading time. But I couldn't search (using Ctrl&F on Firefox etc) to see if a particular song had been recommended without reverting to all comments. If you are now limiting all displays to 500 comments, no-one will be able to check all the songs recommended once the comment total passes that figure. A true All Comments display would be appreciated by the RR collective; if it doesn't happen, some will moan but an awful lot will simply repeat what others have posted, thus increasing the number of posts.

But, generally, I applaud the client to server switch and most of the changes you have made this year. Especially the avatar pics.

Interesting...I tried to post a comment on another article but no comment box appeared. I saw the link to this page and read the comments here about using the top comment button. The article in question had no comments yet therefore had no top or bottom button, just a button. I tried the top comment button here and the comment box appeared so I went back to the original article and lo and behold, the comment box there magically appeared.

Also, I still seem to be in the Mod's naughty corner but there is no message to confirm that like there was before.