It’s been five days since we started the first phase of testing our new commenting system on some of SB Nation’s NFL sites.
As we have said elsewhere, this is the start of the journey, and we don’t yet have a timeline for the rest of the network beyond the 32 NFL venues. The feedback we collect from site managers, contributors, moderators, and community members as we improve the platform will help us inform our rollout schedule from here.
Commentators in our network have expressed their comments, for which we sincerely thank you. We know we can continue to evolve this platform into the tool you deserve, and quickly. Please help us learn how.
Here’s what we’ve learned so far and what we’re doing about it:
What you want
Many of you:
- I love the ignore button
- are more satisfied with the mobile experience (except for a small display bug, we are fixing it in the next version, which will be released in the next few weeks)
- like the ability to control your default sort, from oldest to newest through most recs
- like the idea of downloading your comment history
- like the easy GIF library and the ability to search directly on the site
- like seeing your comments highlighted by site managers
And moderators really like the new tools that help them quickly spot issues and manage the community effectively – making it harder for trolls, spam, and abuse to spoil the conversation.
What needs work
Many of you:
- want to know where new comments are more easily
- don’t like new reading experience (newest first, no unread / recently loaded comment markers, no Z shortcut)
- don’t believe this will work for match day chats
- find the fonts a bit difficult to read
- don’t like the experience of reading deeply in an interlocking conversation
- want to automatically display GIFs / Tweets / videos
- want to upload images elsewhere
- want the cursor to start in the Reply comment box when you press the Reply key
- feel that moderation is too heavy
Plus some suggestions from moderators to make this experience even better. Some of you (much less than these other requests) have asked for the return of signatures, titles, avatars, and sarcasm font.
What we have done so far
- We have adjusted the moderation settings to make it much more forgiving and give more leeway to site moderators. Personal abuse against other community / site team members will always be removed.
- We’ve updated the fonts and colors to make things easier to read.
In the next version:
- We will let users choose to deploy all GIFs / Tweets / YouTube
- We’re going to open “Learn more about this conversation” in a new tab. We know this doesn’t completely solve the problem – this is an intermediate step for you to keep your place in the conversation, while we build a better long-term solution.
- We will continue to improve the style of text, colors and layout, to make it easier to read.
- We will automatically move the cursor to the comment box when you tap Reply
These updates will be rolled out in the coming weeks.
Here’s what else we’ll cover, which will take us a little longer:
- Improvements to the reading experience, including the ability to read nested threads without losing your spot and quickly identify new comments
- Third-party image embedding and display improvements
And of course, we’ll continue to read and listen to the comments as we develop the platform. In the meantime, we see many of you using the new comments platform to talk about sports, and we’re happy to see it.
If you have any other suggestions, comments or ideas, please email them to [email protected]. Thank you for being here as we grow and improve our communities together.
