Many of you remember that in DK4, and when we first launched DK5, there was a little popup alert available that would tell you when new comments were added to a story while you were reading it. However, the DK5 ones were clunky — they went over the text people were reading, and there were too many and stuck around too long and generally made everyone angry and bitter. So we yanked the feature out for a redo.
We’ve redesigned it to be tidier.
- Never more than two boxes: one for replies to comments you wrote, one for other new comments
- Comments are in one or the other, so replies to you are not double-listed
- Smaller
- Out of the way of the comment text for most people
- You are not notified of your own comments (most of us can remember what we wrote for at least a few minutes...)
- They go away as soon as the linked comment is marked as read or clicked-to
- Click a name to go to that user’s comment
- Click the X in the upper right to send the box away
- If too many pile up, we break out the ellipses.
We’ve also changed the autorefresh to respect your preferences to be on or off. By default, it is off. Your choices are: get new comments as they come in with the notification boxes, or don’t poll for new comments at all. This preference can be set either in your profile or using the controls between the story and the comments, in the same way you can set comments to default to expanded or shrunk.
For now, the single comment page does not get autorefresh regardless of your preference setting.
We’ve tested this feature, but a handful of staffers chatting with it isn’t the same as a full-throated Daily Kos live diary with hundreds of chatty people. We look forward to playing with it with you, and if it needs more changes or tweaks, we’ll be on it.