Ask Paul: August 26 (Premium)

Happy Friday! There’s some interesting news buried in here, so let’s kick off the weekend with some great reader questions. And a bit of spelunking.
New comments system feedback
Because so many of you asked, we’ll probably post something more formal soon. But with a week or so of experience with the new OpenWeb comments system here on Thurrott.com, I wanted to at least provide a quick bit of perspective on what we’re seeing, what you’re seeing, and what we’re doing to fix the issues.

Most important, at least to me, is how much of an improvement this new commenting system is compared to what we had in the past. I don’t want that to get lost here: yes, we have tweaks to make. But my god, what an improvement.

So let’s quickly examine the issues.

Scrolling lazy load. The OpenWeb comments section won’t load unless you scroll, and when you do, it does a sort of lazy load where it doesn’t appear immediately. This is a problem on Thurrott.com because one of the ways you can get to the comments for an article from the home page is by clicking the “x comments” link instead of the article title; when you do, you go right to the comments. Which don’t always load automatically. They should, but we’re working with OpenWeb to make this happen more automatically and more quickly.

Notifications. We were really excited about site notifications because they worked great when we tested this feature staging. But it’s not working now at all. We’re investigating this with OpenWeb.

1500-character limit. The default amount of space for comments is 1500 characters, which some are running into. There are two issues here, really: it doesn’t warn you of the limit, and it could perhaps be bigger. For now, we’re going to leave this where it is---1500 characters is about three good-sized paragraphs of text---but we’ll respond to feedback if you think it’s not enough. And, let’s remember that you can all create a forum post of any length if you need more space to discuss some topic.

Extension/reader mode issues. Lots of the issues people are having with comments are related to browser extensions and/or reader modes, especially ad-blockers. I’m personally having an issue with the Dark reader extension I rely on because it hides some UI elements in comments that I need from time to time. We are hoping to implement a dark mode on the site soon which should fix that, but I guess the advice here is to examine whatever extensions you’re using with the site if you have issues with comments.

Moderation. There are lots of questions about moderation. We started with the same OpenWeb best practice default vocabulary that’s used on major websites, but we will tune this for our vocabulary and to be a bit more adult. Also, right now all comments with external links are goes to moderation, and we’re looking at fixing that as well; what I’d like is for people who I’ve OK’d through moderation to be able to publ...