WordPress.com has offered a new upgrade which I’ve installed. It allows replies to individual comments and nested replies 3 levels deep. Feel free to use this new feature. Try it out here.
– Anthony
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Can you hear me now?
yes i can
-Anthony
I’m trying to think of something clever to say, but I just can’t think of anything.
Carry on.
Oh good, now several rounds of fruitless debate will get squished to the right edge. Always a sign that discussion has gone on too long.
Some Usenet news readers had this feature back in the 1990s. Or was it 1980s?
REPLY: I limit to 3 levels for that reason
Very cool. Now all I have to do is figure it out on my blog.
What happens after three levels? Do I get a cupie doll?
I can see a lot of people are going to reply to the first comment to get their POV up to the top of the thread. Maybe some non-relevance snippage will be necessary to discourage this?
sonicfrog:
ribbet!
…might have been appropriate.
Did you also change the sort order from FIFO to LIFO? That is what suddenly appeared to me on the “The madness is about to begin” thread.
Just asking .. thanks!
I must say, I do like this nested reply mechanism. Classy! whoot!
yeah, but a little obvious I think. 🙂
I hope I can start fresh threads so my insightful comments don’t get buried in a thread.
Anthony, you also changed things so that new comments are at the top. Is that a “feature”? Within the threaded replies, new replies are below. Weirder than I care for.
—
> A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
>> Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
>>> A: Top-posting.
>>>> Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?
ric@… http://WermeNH.com/
that was the default setting, I switched it try now with a refresh
TADA! Wonderful!
I must say, you run a great blog here!
as a test of extension, I would like to point out that I hope you are also managing your carbon footprint as I would hate to see this blog go the way of CO2 taxation … 😉
Much better, thanks.
Thanks for going back to FIFO. In this blog, how the conversation develops is more important than treating the newest comment as being most significant.
I am in agreement about FIFO/LIFO .. i would rather FIFO because it is easier (to me anyway) to follow conversation. Don’t mean to be a whiner…
And I didn’t get this reply done before seeing your prior reply .. but this is really nice! This should change the landscape of conversation here a little bit. I really think this is going to add a greater dimension to this blog. Great work Anthony!
Top-posting isn’t so bad, except that when you want to see the mail that came afterwards, you have to remember to press ‘previous.’ That’s just WRONG.
A potential problem with nested comments….. What if some one says an egg?
egg? test
Gave birth to the universe.
I assume you meant “What if some one [L]ays and egg?”
……. Well then. We make a meal of it!!!!!!
Well, no. T’was a deliberate – Figured the phrasing was more appropriate for a discussion about discussing nested threads.
But before I duck the subject entirely: Which came first, the question or the thread?
Interesting, I though Anthony stopped the indenting after three replies – however, there’s no reply button to Robert’s post below. I doubt that was what was intended.
So now that I can’t tell Robert to stop yolking around, I guess I’ll pick on Mr. Hansford.
LIFO is illegal here in Australia. I believe that it is used in the United States for taxation purposes but never for practical purposes!
Anthony
I know full well I’m a technoclod; pls explain what this means in everyday terms because I don’t understand.
Hmm. One problem with replies popping up in the middle of the comment area is that it blows my scanning algorithm out of the water. Currently I keep a window open for each active and interesting subject (nearly all are interesting), then to catch up I go to the bottom, make a mental note of the last time stamp, reload, and search for the time stamp. Then I read down to the bottom.
With embedded replies, I’ll miss new ones unless I scan the whole page. Well, I would like to spend less time reading everything here, so maybe it’ll be a blessing.
All the more reason to hack up a USENET style reader for blogs.
Personally, don’t much care for it – now have to keep looping through the whole dang list each time to see what new comments have been added.
But it helps to have a train of thought in a row, doesnt it? I guess you could never have a perfect system. It seems like tbis is a clear improvement.
It seems like it will be easy to spot a conversation in that the replies are indented.
Is there any way to number the comments? I find that most useful.
I second that. Numbering would be IMHO more helpful than indenting.
Mr. Watts,
Would you consider numbering replies as is the practice on CA ?
REPLY: If I could I would. People seem to miss that I don’t control the features, wordpress.com where this is hosted does. – Anthony
I guess you make the best with the tools at hand. It’s not a perfect solution but in time perhaps we’ll see the usual long running divergent debates between a few commenters held within this nested structure.
Paul — “Personally, don’t much care for it – now have to keep looping through the whole dang list each time to see what new comments have been added.”
AGREED.
This improvement is like the “improved” car bumpers of the 70’s.
Or worse yet, windoze. Used to be to kill a (virus or trojan) file you booted up in DOS, went to the directory, and blew it away. 30 seconds after boot, you’re all done. Thanks to all of the improvements and enhancements, however, you can’t hardly remove stuff yourself, and if you can, it takes hours.
The indented reply stuff is a royal PITA.
I have wished for a feature like this on this site!! Thanks for adding it Anthony!!
Back half a century ago or so, my father bought the car he really wanted with all of the electric gadgets, a 1955 Cadillac. It was used, but it was his.
Anyway, he let me and my brother play with all of the gadgets for a week end. We soon tired of it, then he could get onto business (moving us from upstate New York to down state Louisiana).
I am reminded of that here.
We really do appreciate the adult supervision and thanks for letting us have fun. We will get (more or less) serious once again tomorrow.
Steamboat Jack
Threaded comments go back to the late 1980’s, at least. (Compuserve)
WordPress has a poor implementation of threaded comments, which if done wrong just add to the confusion. Oh yeah, a good implementation allows the client to control whether the view is threaded or not… and the sort order, eliminating confusion.
Message board software is more appropriate for the way this Blog is used.
I always turn this feature off on my sites with a comment section, lol.
Just curious, Anthony, why don’t you run your own server for the site, like you do for CA?
Maybe because he does run his own for CA … sometimes you just want to have someone else make it all work…
I suspect that if you come late to a thread and read it once, it will be a feature. If you come early to a thread, then return a couple of times, it will drive you nuts with the repetitive re-reading and rescanning…
Agreed. The flat structure wasn’t perfect, but easy enough to use.
The numbered system that Climate Audit uses is the best in my opinion. Easy to follow, easy to refer to individual posts.
Good news for people following a sub-thread.
Bad news for people trying to read WUWT on mobile devices.
What I want to know is if I have been nested am I now a Cuckoo?
More seriously it is difficult with a board like this because there is some much useful comment to get at it all, and moreover as the thread splits into various factions, in terms of what they want to discuss, how to group them.
Nesting may, within limits, be better than linear, but it is far from perfect.
But then we do not live in a perfect world where climate is dictated by simplistic models or it’s many secrets discovered by elementary statistical analysis.
We must work with what we have.
Kindest Regards
I love the way it takes you back to the place you were after you submit a reply!
OK Anthony, I’m a convert. 🙂
The text on the preview page, where you see the first three comments, is a bit small and fuzzy.
Is it possible to add an option for threaded or flat mode
REPLY: No
How do I go through 250+ messages and find new replies since last I visited?
Was going to ask the same question, this may pose a problem on a blog as popular as this one.
AGREED!
For that very reason I don’t like the nested replies. What about a poll, Anthony? Maybe not right now, but after a few weeks of experience commentators and readers could make a better judgement.
Or how about the ability to sort the list more than one way? It can also be said that it makes it easier to read through everything if you are willing to skip tangents that don’t interest you. Personally I often use Find to follow things said by a particular person.
Use Firefox and turn on “search for text as I type”. Navigate to the page you want. Type your name. You will be taken directly to your entry.
Don’t know how I ever lived without it. Don’t forget tab-mix-plus and colorful tabs. I have about 150 tabs open right now…
Climate Audits set up was far better. You could follow individual threads by clicking on the reply too number in the message and see who was addressing a point to who and what that point was.
I think the flat list is better for a blog. Mainly because the blog post is supposed to be one subject, instead of a lot of little side subjects, which the nested conversations would be.
And for the obvious resons stated above re: having to re-scan the entire thread for new posts.
Though for me it’s not as much of an issue, since I use Google RSS reader for comments and posts. But, I don’t get all the comments. I don’t know why it happens, but it also happens at CA, so it may be a WordPress problem. I get comments in blocks of 10 or so, some definitely never come through, as is apparent when I go back to read a comment that seemed to be a reply of something I didn’t see.
Jeff Alberts (09:12:51) :
I can imagine it being a nightmare for moderators trying to deal with ever expanding branches of of topic posts.