[Keith Collantine]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to get your thoughts on how comments are working on the site.

Do you read them? Do you post them? How do you think they compare in quality to comments on other sites?

Should more be done to block off-topic comments and comments from ‘trolls’?

What’s good and what’s bad about comments on F1 Fanatic?

Please share your thoughts below.

I’m not looking for suggestions on how to improve comments from a technical perspective, e.g. having an ‘edit’ facility for comments, these improvements are already planned to come on the site in the future.

Thanks for you time,

Keith

[Ady]

I find the comments generally fair and on topic. The conspiracy theorists can get a bit tedious, but everyone has a voice I suppose.

The comments can be quite a good read, and it’s good to get other people’s views on how they see races from their own perspective.

[gatekiller]

Hey Keith,

I think the comments are really good as they are. Sure sometimes there are heated debates which can go on but this is only because most people here are passionate about Formula 1.

I know you said you’re not looking technical suggestions, however, the only one I would suggest at this time is some sort of live comments update. So instead of being subscribed to the email responses which is sometimes hard to follow if there are alot of comments, it would be a nicety if new comments just appeared below previous comments.

Keep up the good work :)

Cheers

Stephen

[Enigma]

The comments are great, most of the people are objective and realistic and it’s great to discuss everything. I’m subscribed to comments via rss, and I read as much of them as I can – which is often too many, and takes a lot of time.

I post few comments/day.

And I think now that you can comment as logged in many things can be added. On the forum you can subscribe via rss for your ‘favourite’ topics, and something like that could be done with the comments as well (you can subscribe to comments on certain article, but that’s not what I mean). It would be great if we could choose our favourite articles and posters and make everything custom, and then receive it on the RSS. So I’d receive, say, all comments on facts&stats, no comments on gp in pictures, and comments from race analysis only from certain commentators. That would be amazing as I’d stop spending hours reading all the comments :)

[Macca]

On the question of do you read the comments.

Yes, sort of. If there is something like 20 or 30 comments then I will read them but if there are anymore then that I don’t bother. And that kind of discorages me from posting because I then think “if I’m not going read the post after 30 – 40 then other proberbly arn’t either.” But that’s just me.

[mattclinch]

I think the comments sections are one of the best things about this site. Reading user generated content and reaction gives this site a much more ‘community’ feel, rather than a simple news magazine/blog – and the comments and reaction is clearly at the heart of the way the site functions.

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.

[Keith Collantine]

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.

That’s interesting… hadn’t thought of that. Cheers Matt.

[Anonymous]

I am happy with the way things are in general. I can never understand why people get hung-up on a single driver and as already stated, their conspiracy theories become tedious.

Being able to tag a comment to an article or topic is really useful. I concur with Matt’s comment. But nothing can be perfect.

[Dougie]

I’ve skimmed the other replies, so apologies if I repeat something here.

Generally I think the comments are great, work really well, and promote great discussions about the topic, easy to add your point and follow. I think some other forums overcomplicate adding comments which puts you off and the simplicity of this solution works very much in its favour, especially if you’re using a smartphone on the train or something.

Suggestions, that are not necessary, but as you are asking…

1. I think this has already been suggested but, being able to choose between displaying the comments as conversation threads (as current), or just a list by date/time would be great. It sometimes is difficult to know what has recently been added.

2. Ability to preview your comments, with the markup processed, before submitting. This would help prevent errors as, with the open nature of these comments compared to the forum, I imagine it is more difficult to identify for edit after.

3. Previously you were able to use buttons to add markup making it really easy. It’s not an issue for me being a developer, but maybe for some others this would help.

[GQsm]

Keith,

generally I think this site gets off quite well with the quality of comments.

There are some trolls which make me want to not bother reading or commenting but these tend to raise their head only when something happens involving Hamilton or some minor scandal. The F1technical.net forum suffers from this greatly and large amounts of threads are spent by people wasting time arguing with one of two arseholes trolling rather than adding constructive info and opinion to the thread.

I think you should keep one eye on this as it tends to be the same people with the outrageous opinion they arrogantly ram down people’s throat as fact. Having the ability to warn and then block these people for ruining a thread of comments would be a big bonus. I can’t bring myself to read through loads of trolling crap and would probably stop reading and posting if it got bad.

[Steph90]

I adore the comments. It’s the second best thing on this site (first being the articles).

I like how you can post a comment and not wait for it to be modded. I think we’ve pretty much all seen trolls here or some very ott comments but I think we’re sensible enough to ignore until Keith deals with them which he always does so and very swiftly too. I’m not too bothered about trolls then. The site will just keep growing so there will be more but the method of dealing with them now I think is spot on.

It’s a really superb community here. I’d say the best out of any F1 site including JA’s. On an article I can recognise msot people’s usernames when the leaver comments and generally even know who they support.

I do take time to read most if not all of the comments (it just depends on how much time I have) because it can bring a new angle/position on issues and generally people here are very balanced (although there are a few very, very pro-Hamilton fans and the odd Massa nutter :P ) and there’s always going to a bit of bias anyway.

I don’t mind off-topic comments if it’s just replying to another commenter. It can mean looking at something we maybe missed etc and now the forum’s back it can just be carried out there instead of pages and pages on the articles.

I also really enjoy how we have the option to comment on any article. It’s a huge privilege we have but I’m all for free speech and like to read what everyone has to say.

I posted around 5 comments a day on an article. If it’s a uni day then it generally goes up :P

[mattclinch]

Ine thing I forgot to mention Keith, though not comment related, is that the whole website is left-aligned. On my 30 inch monitor you only take up the left 3rd. Why not centre it?

[Anonymous]

I think the comments are great, they keep me distracted at work most days so that’s a good thing. I get alerted of all the new comments via email. One thing that would be awesome if actually possible is a different type of email that alerts you when someone responds to your earlier comment. That way it would be easy to keep track of what other people think of your comment, whether they agree / disagree or whatever. I think it would further add to the value of the already valuable comments.

[Dan Thorn]

I love reading the comments, I can spend hours doing so and I often spend a long time replying to someone and then thinking ‘nah, this is a pointless response!” and giving up. I don’t generally post a lot of comments on the site because most of the time other people have summed up my views and they don’t need to be repeated. Because of this I think it might be useful to have a ‘like’ button on comments so that users can easily identify which are popular opinions and which aren’t.

Trolls are part and parcel of anything involving comments and forums, but most of the time I can have a good laugh at them and not take them seriously. As long as people don’t get personal I have no problem with ridiculous conspiracy theories! After all, people are entitled to their opinions. I do agree with GQsm however that users who repeatedly derail threads with nonsensical drivel should be warned. (Jonathan Legard, for instance ;) )

[Bullfrog]

It’s always good fun when a caption competition breaks out, so I wonder if more attention could be drawn to the comments on pictures – say a number in brackets after each caption that links to its comments.

It’s nice to be able to comment on an individual photo, but I wonder if anyone ever reads these.

And how about limiting the length on individual comments – or paragraphs? ;)

[Author]

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