Hi all. I just wanted to give you all a heads-up about two coming changes to Thurrott.com and our sister site, Petri.com. We’re hoping to implement these changes in the next day or so, but certainly by the end of the weekend.
The first is related to comments.
As you probably know, we currently have separate comments for Premium and non-Premium members. We did this for good reasons, but the result is a custom component that bogs down the site performance. And we’ve wanted to change this to a more traditional comments system to allow for more natural and fluid discussions for a while now.
So, going forward, we will be using a more standard commenting system. This will be properly nested and threaded, answering long-standing complaints. It will be much faster overall. And previous articles will display existing comments correctly commingled.
There is one bit of bad news, however: Premium badges will temporarily all be the same color, meaning that those who chose a custom color will lose that, at least for now. That will be fixed soon, however.
The second change is related to the mobile version of the websites.
Google recently announced a page experience update to its site ranking system, and the current versions of our websites rank poorly using this new system. As a result, we are moving to Google AMP (which is no longer an acronym but used to stand for Accelerated Mobile Page). The new mobile sites will have cleaner, faster new themes for the home pages and article pages. (And I think they look great, for whatever that’s worth.)
Thanks!
Paul
dftf
<p>Thanks for the update, Paul!</p><p><br></p><p>I've never understood why Premium and Non-Premium comments were separated; I've never found any-other website that works in this way. And to view Premium comments on an article, as a free-member, you have to use up one of the three free monthly acticle views.</p><p><br></p><p>Glad to hear the comments will <em>finally </em>be threaded properly too… though any-chance of also explaining what the difference is between the red heart icon and the black? I'm assuming it's when one of the site owners like a comment, as it clearly doesn't mean "most-popular comment" as you can easily find articles where the red heart comment isn't the most-liked overall.</p><p><br></p><p>On an area you didn't mention though — the forums. Any chance of making it so a forum-post gets auto-locked say one month after the last comment so years-old dormant ones cannot suddenly get resurrected from the dead? Again, something most other websites do as-standard with their forums…</p>
dftf
<blockquote><em><a href="#625837">In reply to paul-thurrott:</a></em></blockquote><p>At the top-right of a comment is a heart-icon, which shows to the left of it how many likes that comment has received.</p><p><br></p><p>Sometimes this heart icon, for some comments, is coloured red, even on a browser I'm not signed into, and have cleared cookies on. In such an instance, what does the red colour represent? I've always assumed it's a comment you, or another owner, has liked?</p><p><br></p><p>(When I'm signed in, a red-heart means a comment I've liked personally, of course).</p>
dftf
<p>Another thing: maybe revise the error-message displayed when trying to adding an image or URL to a comment? Currently, it just says "Something went wrong.", which is rather generic, and makes the user think the issue is their-side, such as browser settings or blockers. I'm guessing it should say "Sorry, adding links is only available to Premium members" or similar?</p>