While I’ve been providing some informal updates on HomeCrowd (our new comments system), I thought it was about time I provided an official update on developments.
We’ve been testing the new comments system behind the scene for a couple of weeks, using it to discuss Scout Picks and other site matters. With a few more tweaks to come, this weekend we should be at the point to allow a number of community members to get access and help us move that testing on.
Ed is worked today on adding inline admin tools (to allow the moderation of comments in the list view rather than via the admin panel) and completed the recent comments widget to mirror the current version. Once these are in place, we’ll be looking for a small group of community members to help offer their assistance.
Testers will see a very similar look and feel to the present system, which is intentional of course, with the notable addition of comment voting, stickies and fixed elements like email notification of replies to comments.
For testing purposes, we will be displaying the comment rating and discussion rating that votes creates – in basic terms, the reputation of a user is added to the comment rating when a vote is cast (or subtracted if it’s a downvote). Discussion ratings are the sum of the comment rating and its replies. We’ll be hiding both numbers when we go live, although we may represent comment rating graphically and users will be able to sort comments by discussion rating in order to view the very best discussions for a given article.
There are new features to be added after this phase of testing, notable profile pages for recalling user comments and replies, the follow function to allow you to filter threads for comments made by your favourite posters and the full sticky comment feature that will list recent stickied comments as “Hot Topics” in the sidebar for easy retrieval alongside the recent comments widget.
These are all features that will be applied and tested in the coming weeks, by which time we will have hopefully got the basics of the system tested and ready for rollout to the live site – with your help.
I’ll be posting details of how you can volunteer to help test HomeCrowd on Friday, in time to let some users loose on the test servers at some point this weekend.
