Comment System Update
Marc’s note: Last week we upgraded our comment system to a new version from our provider Disqus, however we’ve had reports of some users experiencing problems. We’ve informed Disqus of the issues and have reverted back to the previous version. When they fix the current version we’ll do the upgrade.
My 2c here, but if you’re going with a 3rd party commenting system, it should not be beta quality.
The inability to reply/access posts that are nested more than 3 deep is ridiculous.
The other day a post of mine appeared twice for some reason, but there was no way to delete the dplicate. It’s 2012. There’s got to be a commenting engine that’s mature and works properly.
Nested comment depth now set to 5.
It’s not that the system won’t take it – it’s that you can’t reach the “reply” button on the right since the forum is fixed width.
Which is another gripe… my monitor is 1600 wide, but the diqus forum is maybe 600.
There is no reply button on maximally nested comments. Marc’s choice was to either allow unlimited nesting (which I’ve seen on other sites, it gets… funky) or limit the depth, but lose the reply button.
In the the new version, I noticed it had a reply button on maximally nested comments, (hooray!), however the depth was even more limited. But I think we could have gotten used to that, since the original pre-Disqus comment system had no nesting.
Marc,
I don’t know what other comments you’ve had from people, but I’ve been frustrated by one particular bug since even before the “upgrade” — when I try to load a comments page. I get the page head and ads, but the actual comments don’t load; it‘s just a big blank. I just keep hitting Refresh until they appear, which sometimes takes a lot of tries and sometimes they never show up. This may be on my end, but it happens on all my computers. The same thing happens if I log into DISQUS first and then go to NASA Watch from there. My ISP (high-speed cable) says it’s not them at fault, but it might be them because I occasionally have to try twice to get pages on other sites.
It’s also annoying that the DISQUS certificate isn’t right and therefore I basically have to do everything in the log in procedure twice. That, I would say, is a problem with DISQUS’s ISP.
As for the latest, repealed, upgrade. I was really disappointed to see that they made it IE8 dependent. It worked fine for me with IE7 and Flash 11, but now with IE8 everything is incredibly, painfully slow to load (IE8 is at fault).
Thanks for all your hard work, Marc,
Steve
I’ll forward your comments.
Thanks much Marc. We appreciate all your effort.
Steve
yeah, that too 🙂 !!
Addendum:
Marc,
Is there a way to configure DISQUS to load more than 20 comments at once, or even load them all for a thread at once? (I found the Help to bea little lame; SOP).
Thanks,
Steve
Please please please.
Done. Now 80.
Sweet!
I was seeing my posts collapsed and flagged, saying it was for abuses.
If you have any issues, now is the time to speak up as I’ll send them as a batch to Disqus. Thanks.
Couple of wishes for additions to the new system, rather than bugs. (I sent my bug-complaints directly to Disqus when the new system was up.)
– A simple line, thin as they like, wherever nested replies go up a level. Since all the replies are displayed at the same indent, but in order of threading, it would be nice to have a visual indicator that comment 7 has a different parent than comments 5 & 6.
– A subtle highlighting of the newest few comments. Makes it easier to skim old threads for that one new comment. Ideally a user-defined number in a drop-down next to the display-order drop-down option, but even a fixed number would be better than nothing.
– Alternatively, subtly different colours for comments of different ages. Minutes ago, hours ago, one day ago, multiple days ago.
– Alternatively, just a “Newest” button at the top of the comments, that jumps you straight to the most recent comment.
Paul,
I agree completely with your ideas, but I humbly beg the DISQUS people not to make them available until they’ve made sure that they’re done properly from a software design point of view. We see the same pattern over and over in almost all programs and operating systems — a new product starts out lean and mean and we love it, but then the revs start and it tries to be all things to all people and pretty soon we have just one more bloated house of cards. I encourage them to spend the time to implement changes properly, as opposed to just hanging more and more new functions on the same tired tree. Experienced software designers (as opposed to programmers) know what I mean; a well structured program endures for years, but a minimum budget and schedule implementation is just shooting yourself squarely in the foot.
Never go straight from upgrade to beta testing. You can never do enough in-hose alpha testing.
Steve
Folks:
Comparability issues are why I got out of programing in the first place. A public commenting system should be compatible with even old browsers like Netscape! Point being, it should be compatible at the lowest common denominator. This site’s (NasaWatch) engine, Drupal, has a reputation of backwards compatibility and I’ve viewed it on IE 5 with no problems (until it switched to DISQUS). I’m not complaining, but accessibility should reach the widest audience. One tip might be to look for a commenting engine that uses HTML5 instead of Adobe Flash. Then compatibility issues should disappear for up to date browsers.
My solution is to carry around a copy of Portable Firefox to view NasaWatch ‘abroad’, as it were. My settings, my bookmarks, my passwords.
tinker
BTW NASA Watch is not using Drupal. 99% of our IE and Firefox users are using IE 7.0 and Firefox 10 an higher. This does not include mobile. I don’t see any Netscape users 😉 in our stats.
Maybe they gave up trying?
I am not perfectly pleased with Disqus either, but it is a doorway to commenting on more and more of my chosen websites each day… it’s becoming a WWW staple for forums. That’s a good thing, mostly. I’m glad NASA Watch and SpaceRef use it. If you’ve ever moderated a comment board you’d soon start looking for an automator service
We should all temper our opinion by remembering we do not pay a penny for this service across the board ( although Keith and Marc et al deserve more support than just lip service , since I learn something new and useful here every day for sure. It’s a great nutritious forum once the usual chaff is tossed away.)
I have no idea how Disqus pays for itself, but I’m willing to tolerate its shortcomings until it really starts messing up. So far on my iMac , Firefox with a slew of privacy extensions , and Snow Leopard OS that has not happened… yet . Just a few hiccups along the way.
Someday –probably sooner than we are willing to admit— we’ll all be paying a meter in micro-currency to enjoy the mainstream services on the web we now take for granted and recieve free.
I am concerned about post the comments through the various Facebook and other options. Personally I do not want my comments on NASAWatch tieing into the other networks. Putting the various options on an even level with DISQUS leaves me concerned that I might inadvertently press the wrong button. It also took me some time to figure out that you had to comment and then press the D (Disqus) button in order to get the username and password log-ins. Until I tried that it just looked like the old log in blanks had disappeared and there was no longer a way to log in.
I couldn’t find a place in either old or new Disqus to set my default sorting (oldest first, etc). On some computers it seems to remember the setting that I used previously, but on others it always defaults to “Sorting by popular now” and I have to constantly change it for every topic that I read. I’m sure there is a technical reason why this occurs but I would think that it could be solved by making this a profile setting. Maybe it’s there somewhere and I just couldn’t find it.
Yup, that too. 🙂
The edit box on new Disqus was still very tiny and hard to use, especially on a tablet. Maybe that’s by design as an incentive to stop making mistakes!
Agreed. We asked about this a few revs back and they said they were looking at it. My problem is that the more you type into a comment or edit a comment, the slower the response becomes, until it freezes all together. In the Edit mode it’s even worse. At a guess, the memory allocation and/or stack size is way too small. By habit I now create/edit comments in another program then paste them into DISQUS. It’s extra work, but you can see what you’re doing, review, edit, spell check, and then paste it.
I also use the HTML <br> instead of letting DISQUS toss a coin every time on how to do carriage return/line feeds.
Steve
“By habit I now create/edit comments in another program then paste them into DISQUS.”
But then you run up against Disqus’ paste-text bug where it randomly cuts lines.
Paul,
I haven’t had that problem (or at least I haven’t noticed it). I have a secret weapon that may explain why — I have two different versions of MS Word on my computers and one of them is version 2.0, an ooooooooold version which doesn’t have any of the endless, needless bells and whistles. It’s more than a text editor, but much less compliicated than newer versions of Word. I’ve also had success TextPad, a freeware program that’s much like Notepad, but a little more friendly. I also format text and insert line breaks using HTML tags, which the DISQUS editor seems to treat more reliably than just using the return key (two HTML breaks is a new paragraph). Another thing I’ve noticed is that DISQUS will take Alt/Numpad characters, just like Word, using the HTML codes. Examples: a left cheveron (<) is “& # 060;” (include semicolon, leave out spaces); a long dash (em) character (—) is “& # 151;”, and a forced white space ( ) is “& n b s p;” [here is 6 white spaces characters , which DISQUS won’t let you do any other way]. You can also enter special characters using the Alt key and the numerical keypad, just like in Word (which is actually the harder way for laptop users). End of trivia.
Steve
“a left cheveron (<) is “<” “
Also < and >
And —
Which I find easier to remember. Less-than, greater-than, m-dash, etc. Like copyright is obviously © ©
(And, of course & for &. Which has been useful in this comment.)
They used to let you do subscript/superscript, strike-throughs, etc. But then they stopped working for some reason.) Annoying, because I like using strike-through for joking “self-corrections”.
Re: Cut’n’paste.
I find Disqus does it even when I cut’n’paste entirely within a Disqus comment. But inconsistently. (Don’t know if they’ve solved it in the new version, haven’t used it enough.)
Now to find out how much I broke this comment… [edit: just one typo! Woo!] [2nd edit: make that two.] [3rd edit: five…]
I find the window in this current version to be good the newer version was to small for my iPod
I had complained about not being able to login but that was before I realized the the icons were now clickable and standard D was one of the choices.
Again DATE AND TIME of each post is important to me.
Plus I like disqus because I had blocking issues before with the older system.
NASA watch threads can last a few days. A simple time and date of each post like we had on the old system was great. It is very frustrating to go back a day or two and try to guess who posted what when 2 days ago. I think we all can figure out what the date and time is without having a computer figure out how long ago it was.
However, we have different time-zones. I’d see just-posted comments with yesterday’s date. And times that bore no relation to local time.
6 minutes ago, 1 hour ago, 17 hours ago, 1 day ago, 3 days ago, is universal. Certainly made it easier for me to skim old-threads quickly for new comments.
Maybe count of time that has past without rounding off to days.
I was distressed when you went to disqus in the first place, it’s horribly buggy and often wont load.
For several months after the switch, I was unable to load any comments. At some point I became able to again, but then apparently due to your recent switch, was again unable to.
I’d kind of written off NASAWatch after the first experience, too frustrating to not be able to read the comments, which is where a lot of the info comes from.
When it started working again I was happy, but this latest thing had me thinking it was again going to be relegating NASAWatch to “maybe check every couple of weeks if you think of it” status.
Glad to see comments working again, if temporarily.
It’s not just NASAWatch, it’s blogs that use Disqus, globally. It’s the most unreliable commenting system out there, makes many blogs useless.
I would like to suggest that you drop the Disqus POS and look for an alternative. I wanted to suggest that way back when you first switched, but was of course unable to comment and therefore unable to say that.
Seriously – check around the web, Disqus is notorious for this kind of thing. I think going to it was a bad move, period.
(FYI, this has been the case with multiple PCs using several different browsers, three different operating systems – WinXp, Win7 and Linux, via four ISPs. So it’s not something on my end.)
So here’s my dilemma. This comment is being posted from Linux Ubuntu using Firefox 12 and it works.
And here’s another comment from a WindowsXP machine running IE8. It works. I also tried it on a laptop running Windows7 and IE9 and it works. So I don’t know what the issue is.