Just a quick bit of housekeeping here with regard to the new Wings comments section, which offers far more functionality but has also attracted a few complaints because it’s no longer a straight chronology of oldest-to-newest tweets.
(We could actually change that back, but the cost would be losing the ability to reply directly to individual comments, which is a big loss, so we’re leaving it as it is for now.)
To those beefing because that means you can’t now immediately tell which comments are new, a couple of helpful pointers. The easiest way to fix the problem is a simple one: keep the tab open.
If you keep the most recent page open in a tab on your browser, the Comment Bubble (visible at the bottom left of that pic) will keep track of all new comments – it refreshes every 30 seconds – and highlight them for you in yellow until you’ve read them.
(The little orange circle should take you to the first unread one if you click it.)
Sadly the Bubble stops working if you close the tab or navigate to a new page from it, but since most people have scores of tabs open at a time that shouldn’t be a problem. So there you go.
There are also a couple of other handy wee features. You can choose to “subscribe” to a particular page, in which case you’ll be notified by email of any new comments in the thread, or just those that are replies to YOUR comments. Choose which you want from the drop-down menu, click the little green > symbol and Bob’s your auntie’s gardener.
(You can unsubscribe the exact same way.)
We’ve also greatly expanded and enhanced the “Recent Comments” sidebar which appears at the right-hand side of both the main front page and individual articles.
It now contains the most recent 30 comments (on any page), along with a preview of each comment and a link that’ll take you directly to it.
Hopefully between them these features will resolve the complaints that some have had about the new Comments function, although as far as we can tell most people seem to prefer it anyway. Once again, the key is keeping a tab open in your browser for any pages that you want to follow comments on. Do that and you’ll always know at a glance which comments are new.
Any questions?
