Behind Thurrott.com: We Have a New Comments System

As you may have noticed, we started updating the comments system to a new custom-built WordPress-based solution this past weekend. This is a work in progress that’s happening in stages, but I wanted to provide a brief update about what’s happening and address some of the early feedback.

? New comments: When and where

For now, you will see the new comments system on new articles and forum posts (like this one) and the old OpenWeb-based comments on articles from (roughly) before Saturday (like this one). We will import all the OpenWeb comments into the new system this week and integrate them normally into the new system.

A link to the community guidelines should appear above the comments today or soon.

? Reactions

We just implemented an early version of reactions, an emoji-based replacement for “upvote” that has, for now, four choices: ? Thumbs-up (the default), ? Fire, ? Laugh, and ? Shit. But we can add more, and while I don’t want to open this up to the entire catalog of emoji choices or let too much negativity into the system, let me know if there are any obvious choices we’re missing. I’m open to adding at least a few more.

✚ Points system

With this shift to an in-house comments system, we are adding commenting and reacting to those things that earn points, alongside logging in, reading articles, and favoriting articles. So these activities will reflect in the leaderboard, and we’re working on a badge system of some kind TBD.

?️ Early feedback

I have a few comments related to the feedback from the initial forum post.

The new system does not have the AI-based moderation capabilities that made my life so easy with OpenWeb, but there are a few controls in there designed to help keep spam comments to a minimum. I will continue to moderate comments, of course, and will aggressively moderate anything personal, off-topic, or similar.

Regarding the basic UI, we’re not changing anything at the comment, in part because it’s not fully rolled out and in part because it’s the way I wanted it. But we will evaluate all that in time and make changes as needed, of course. I just want to get this thing working properly before even thinking about fit and finish or personal preference-related changes.

There are lots of little fit and finish things to do (for example, when you click the “x comments” link under an article title it doesn’t go to the comments section, it just loads the page normally). But this is happening in real time and we will clean it all up.

Thanks!