New and Improved Comments (updated 10/25/2021)
To enable site users to load and read stories having thousands of comments with greater ease and completeness, our developers embarked on a major overhaul of our comment feature. As of May, 2019, the new format, nicknamed "lazy comments," loads as the default mode on desktops. (Changes to enable mobile devices to support the new style are still in progress.)
As of October 25, 2021 we have deactivated the cookie that permits setting a site-wide preference for the old comment style. It is still possible to view comments in that mode, on a story-by-story basis. Adding this string to the end of a story URL ?new_comments=false will turn OFF the new comment styling for that specific story only. The change will apply only to that single story, and only when you are viewing it via that specific, augmented URL.
Here is an example to illustrate. The top story on the Front Page at the moment of writing this update is https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/10/25/2060169/-Frustration-grows-among-Democrats-Biden-over-threat-filibuster-poses-to-democracy Viewing this URL with the query string added -- https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/10/25/2060169/-Frustration-grows-among-Democrats-Biden-over-threat-filibuster-poses-to-democracy?new_comments=false -- will load the identical format for the story, but the old-style comments will display instead of the new.
On any platform, mobile or desktop, going to https://m.dailykos.com will load the mobile version of Daily Kos, which still has the old-style comments. When we have made additional changes so that mobile devices will support the new comments, that option will be closed off. We do not know exactly when that will happen.
The new comment format addresses these issues, behind the scenes, among others:
- Less memory overhead for long threads
- Faster loading time and less bandwidth for long threads
Other features are more obvious to users:
- Your comment text is autosaved locally while you draft it
- Total comment count now updates during autorefresh
- Recommend count now updates during autorefresh
- Narrow view option is still readable
- Slightly more compact style puts more comments in the same area
- Keyboard-only submit for comments, fully supported
- An open, unfinished comment reply will recenter if you type in the box
- More obvious marker for the story author in comments (eventually for staff too)
- Fold/unfold comment triangle moved back to the left side
- We’ve swapped the key commands so that j/k(lowercase) are now next and previous comment, and shift-J/shift-K(uppercase) are now next unread/previous unread.
- We’ve added a key command 1 to go to the first comment in the story, and 2 to go to the last comment in the story.
For more background and context, please consult this post by elfling, "You May Have Already Won The Chance to Use Daily Kos' New Comment System." That post also provides links to earlier posts published while the revisions were in the beta process.