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Improving comments on F1 Fanatic (73 posts)

Topic tags: comments

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plushpile said 2 years, 11 months ago:

The comments are part of the charm that makes this the best F1 site around!

I only have two ways to improve them;

Firstly – a simple ‘report’ button. This would save you reading all replied for trolls etc and have readers just flag them for you…

Secondly – I only ever read the comments to an article once, once I’ve read them I never go back and read new ones because it’s so annoying to re-read the same comments again. So what i’d like to see is a way to see a difference between comments you’ve already read and new ones. It would be as easy as having a different background colour for ‘new’ comments since last time I read the article.
Threading the comments by time doesn’t work either (this is how the comments appear on the mobile website) as replies to a previous post are never in context, which is why I never read the comments on the mobile version of the website.

for tl;dr
Add a flag to report trolls
Change the colour on new comments since last time you read them.

Thanks!

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sw6569 said 2 years, 11 months ago:

personally i’m not a fan of the comments system, as I believe that it has a few basic flaws.

It needs an edit function firstly

Secondly, I tend to only read comments on the first page. I think thats the case with most people – anything on the second page is usually lost. This is a big flaw, although I don’t know how it could be addressed.

Thirdly, and perhaps more of a general point, I noticed that a topic on the forum was deleted as it was too similar to the comments. I don’t understand why that would need to be done, as surely a forum is a place for discussion as much as the comments section?

Re: Trolls etc, I don’t tend to notice them if there are any, but thats because I tend not to read the comments anyway as I don’t like the way they are currently presented!

Is there a way that our accounts can somehow be linked with the forum accounts? i.e. that we can view our posts not only on the forum but the comments section too provided they are from the same account?

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macahan said 2 years, 11 months ago:

Of course I post comments and read other comments. I find a lot of them are very enlightening with good information but there are some trolls and conspiracy theorists and there will always be that way no matter what and where. Little can be done about it I’m afraid.

One thing I really would enjoy seeing is on the comments a flag that indicate what comments are new since last visit. I often come back to a post to read what new comments people have made but when there are a lot of comments it can take a lot of time to go through comments and you often reread old comments. A cookie could be set that indicate when last you visited the page and any comments with a time newer then last visit would get a flag indicating new comment..

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Maksutov said 2 years, 11 months ago:

my suggestions:

1) Implement a simple email notification system that notifies the user when a reply is posted on their comment.

2) Implement a Vote-up and vote-down and flag for spam system for all comments. This will solve number of problems including massive help against trolls. Most importantly it will prevent comments from being repeated hundreds of times and key elements of the discussion are kept in the same place. Generally if people keep posting biased or illogical rubbish far too often they will soon learn that they in fact don’t know as much about F1 as they think.

3) I agree with mattclinch: “The way that people can respond directly underneath an early comment and have a long discussion means that even the 5th or 6th indivdual reply can get bumped off to the second page which is annoying – an ‘expand’ function would be easier and would make replying to early posts for the sake of getting on the first page less appealing.”

4) Please make Edit feature.

5) Implement steps 1-4 asap, and you will find that the popularity if your site will grow even more.

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electrolite said 2 years, 11 months ago:

The negative, cynical conspiracy theorists are my only bother really. Apart from that it’s great!

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Enigma said 2 years, 11 months ago:

I agree about the voting on comments – show 2 or 3 top rated first, like on youtube.

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Katy said 2 years, 11 months ago:

I think the comments are great, I often read them all even if I don’t post myself as I find someone’s already made the point better than I could haha. I think the idea of being able to hide/expand the replies would be great because as it was earlier mentioned a lot of people just comment on the first couple of posts so their comment is high up regardless of whether it’s a related point.7

Not sure about the voting for posts thing, it’ll get spammed like youtube, people will just vote -ve against comments that say good things about drivers they don’t like, it’s pointless.

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Stubie said 2 years, 11 months ago:

The comments are one of the very best aspects of your site Keith. You have managed to attract a very knowledgeable, engaged and (for the most part) respectful community. Complainers about the conspiracy theorists may not have spent too much time reading political blogs!

I would like to add my support for the suggestion about voting for / against comments. Even if you do get many people down voting when someone supports a particular driver or team I think you gain another benefit of being able to create detailed profiles of your community… you can begin to develop an understanding of patterns of our behavior. In the future you may be able to mine that behavior for clues on how to get more activity on your site.

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Hairs said 2 years, 11 months ago:

What’s the best thing about the comments? I think we already know that, don’t we?

I think the comments here are some of the best on any F1 site – people tend to be informed, reasonable and fair. More importantly, they are prepared to listen to each other and change their mind. That’s valuable, and the way to keep that is to keep the trolls down. I like that low-volume replies carry a warning, although the “Your comment is too short” shouldn’t be allowed to flesh out the comment – that’s a case for deletion I think. If you can’t fill the box with what you’ve got, then you’ll just have to work it up until you can splurge properly.

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Icthyes said 2 years, 11 months ago:

I really like the idea of editing comments, having an “expand” feature like on facebook, and having favourite topics to follow. apart from that, I can’t really think of anything else!

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electrolite said 2 years, 11 months ago:

Have a voting comment system – but don’t show the amount of votes, like youtube does, to prevent hating and opinions affecting judgement, like Katy said. Just have the ones with the most ‘thumbs up’, at the top.

Or only make it possible to ‘like’ comments, and no thumbs down option, like facebook almost.

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TommyB said 2 years, 11 months ago:

Please please please don’t have a voting system. Liking is ok but I think people will just vote on opinions they agree with instead of good comments.

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Keith Collantine said 2 years, 11 months ago:

This set of comments from today involves one of the problems several people above have mentioned, I’d be interested to get your thoughts on it:

http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk/2010/06/15/hamilton-wins-despite-more-pit-stop-problems-mclaren-race-review/comment-page-1/#comment-386399

An excerpt from a comment I posted there:

My interest is to promote a good quality of debate on this site. If that means preventing certain people who can�t act reasonably from participating I am quite happy to.

There are plenty of other places to discuss F1 who offer completely unrestricted and unmoderated commenting and their standard of debate is dismal as a result.

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US_Peter said 2 years, 11 months ago:

My main complaint would be the lack of edit or delete functionality, but it sounds like you’re already working on that.

Also, once in a while I read some fairly inflammatory comments from one reader directed at another to the general effect of “you’re an idiot for liking driver X, driver Y is MY favorite.” I don’t like websites that feel like they’re being policed, but if readers can’t maintain a basic level of decorum…

Edit: Keith, I missed your post while I was typing this and daydreaming. I would include that particular comment thread in what I was referring to above. I think your response was appropriate.

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sato113 said 2 years, 11 months ago:

i agree with matt about the expand thingy. but ONLY expand after the 3rd (or so) reply comment.
apart from the lack of ‘bold’, ‘italics’, ‘quote’ etc. i’m happy with the comments.

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