With the last post at over 2000 comments and with the new comment system tentatively ready for it’s next round of testing, I’m going to try something this morning.

We’re going to put a new comment system through a “public beta”.

In a few hours a new comment system is due to “go live” on this site. There’s a very good chance that the new system won’t solve all our problems and hand us a load of new bugs to solve. However, I’ve decided to go with it this morning and hopefully over the Fantasy Premier League deadline period to see how it copes. The beauty of this new system is that it can easily be rolled back to what we have now if things should go awry.

The first thing to stress then – this is just a test. No decision will be made on whether this stays permanently as yet and there’s a 99% chance that we will revert back to our old comments system later today…

I’ve been looking to introduce a new system for two reasons. Firstly by introducing a system hosted by a third party, it allow the site to remain stable during very heavy traffic periods. Recently I’ve had to close comments around Fantasy Premier League deadline periods to ensure the server remains intact. Hopefully the new system will solve this problem.

Secondly the system will introduce a whole array of new features that will help take the growing community on this site to another level. Here’s just a sample…

• Comment page numbers are back easing navigation.
• Users can sort an entire set of comments by Date, Rating or Recent Activity.
• Users can expand and collapse replies to make reading through a long list of comments far easier.
• Users will be able to edit their comment posts (provided there are no replies).
• Users can like and dislike other peoples comments.
• Users gain a reputation according to the number and quality of their posts.
• Users can flag posts for moderation.
• Users can follow other users in order to quickly locate their favourite posters in an article thread (followed users are highlighted for you).
• Users get profile pages – these include a record all comments posted, images/avatars and also an unlimited number of URL links meaning you can link to a number of your fantasy teams.

All this good stuff comes with a hopefully minor drawback. In order to use the new system, all our visitors will need to register with its provider – IntenseDebate. The process if very simple and you can read up on their privacy policy here. Just to avoid confusion, IntenseDebate are now owned by Automatic which is the company behind WordPress, the platform on which this site is built.

One thing to stress – your existing username and password for this site will not be valid once this new system is in place.

Signing up to IntenseDebate is very quick – you just need to select a Username, Password and supply a valid Email Address. One thing to note – you may not be able to use your registration details used on this site right now but don’t worry, you can change your display name to your familiar community name once you’ve registered.

Once we go live in a couple of hours then you will need to be registered with IntenseDebate to make a post so you may want to get in now and get a head start, perhaps even set up your profile and avatar. On the subject of gravatars, you can tell IntenseDebate to use your existing gravatar via your profile providing you’re using the same email address for both gravatar.com and your IntenseDebate account.

Fingers crossed that this all goes well.

Look out for the Pre-match Preamble which is likely to be the post that rolls out the new system.