Some suggestions for the new comment feed

[panzerkampfwagyu]

As the Canary version has the new comment style now, I've seen some things that could be improved.

1. I would change it to paginated from infinite scroll.
2. The Reply Feature should be changed to make multi-replies possible.
3. Way more reaction type emojis are required.

Also, I find them pretty unambitious at the moment. There are no Xenforo limits any more, so having less features seems pretty weird. Good for a start, however

 

[Mangamoz]

Ah, didn't realize that today is the day that forum interaction with the main site is KILL. Welp, time to test the limits of the new mainsite comments...

 

[Tju]

I'd like to see an option to make the comments full screen immediately.
readability is atrocious in such a small sidetab.

cannot say how well the interface works for writing comments becaus its locked behind a paywall, which is just fucking ridiculous for whats essentially a pirate site.
but maybe they let all the scamlation groups back onto the site soon. who knows where this is going.

 

[erellisae]

(x) Doubt. As long as it remains a “social-style comment system,” it will never be as good as the forum for thoughtful discussions. It’ll just be a bunch of short comments pointing out the obvious.

Yeah, uh. My interaction with the forums is mostly doing long-form PR posts for translations that need it. Doing that in a sidebar - even showing that in a sidebar - will really suck. Even mid-size paragraphs are going to look very bad in a sidebar that thin - the ability to give feedback on translations or talk at length about a plot will be significantly curtailed.

 

[panzerkampfwagyu]

I'd like to see an option to make the comments full screen immediately.
readability is atrocious in such a small sidetab.

cannot say how well the interface works for writing comments becaus its locked behind a paywall, which is just fucking ridiculous for whats essentially a pirate site.
but maybe they let all the scamlation groups back onto the site soon. who knows where this is going.

The locking is temporary, as had been said multiple times already and now it's also open to contributors, with plans to roll it out to the rest later.

 

[imadoathing]

the current big issue im seeing is that chapters without comments don't have the "see older replies" button to get to the forum, so unless thats intentional they should really add a dedicated forum button to the chapters sidebar

 

[erellisae]

I went back to check and even the laziest 'wow this MTL sucks' PR pass 1 is over 1000 characters.

6.2k 6.4k 7k 6k

I'm mostly just concerned that this may hinder one of the major ways readers have to meaningfully help support new translators that care about improving beyond MTL output. Sure, you're always going to have bad MTL snipes but there have been translators that ask for specific critiques and take them on. Doing it on a forum was better than having to go around joining a thousand rando discords.

e: I've just seen the dev thread that states the forum discussions will not be phased out, so I think that's my concern covered...? That wasn't really clear from the notice post.

 

[lalap00p]

e: I've just seen the dev thread that states the forum discussions will not be phased out, so I think that's my concern covered...? That wasn't really clear from the notice post.

I really hope this doesn't change. I felt like I was going crazy when opening comments and suddenly being greeted with "you have to be a supporter to comment", even more that I can only start commenting over round about ways (going to the forum first).

 

[shae_]

Remove this(views counter), replace it with a button that sends the user to the forums for the chapter.

 

[Darkshade13]

There really needs to be a way for non-supporter users to start or get forum discussion threads for new chapters for however long it takes until the new comment system (which I don't like, but this is neither here nor there and not the place for such discussion) is opened up for all users.

There are several chapters that I might want to comment on right now. And I should be able to in the forum setup if that's not going away as promised. But the way things are I can't unless someone who is a supporter makes the thread for it, and that's not a given based on the fact that supporters are free to just use the new embedded comments.

As long as the current tiered setup is confusing and not really explained or laid out well in a public place that users are going to see without having to look for an explanation (so no, the forums' site updates commentary and threads don't really do the job well enough) if the admins want user engagement retained they need to make it easy, explicit, and clear how those users can still use the opportunities available to them, including being able to start a new chapter thread in the forums for series that don't have one yet. Otherwise people are going to get angry because it really looks like the confusion is by design and intended to torpedo the forums and the engagement of non-supporter users for however long this beta period lasts (and the longer it lasts the greater the chance the dissatisfaction ends up having a permanent impact)

 

[shinya78]

Remove this(views counter), replace it with a button that sends the user to the forums for the chapter.

Wait, that thing has been stuck at N/A for as long as I can remember, they might as well repurpose it for something else if it's gonna stay that way for a long time.

I just finished editing my own suggestion to make my point across more easily, and since it technically doesn't touch the new comment feed, I never posted it over at this thread.

 

[erellisae]

e: I've just seen the dev thread that states the forum discussions will not be phased out, so I think that's my concern covered...? That wasn't really clear from the notice post.

To explain this point better:

• The Notice post says 'move [comments] away from the obscurity of the forums'
• The link to the forums is called 'view older posts' rather than 'view forums'

That made (and is still making) me assume that the forum was considered 'old' rather than a separate thing, and that the plan was to excise the forums entirely. It's not really clear at the moment, and the combative tone of the other thread didn't really make it any clearer. Like I said, my only angle here is the concern that this will allow easier, freer MTL dumping because the sidebar plays to those users who (no disrespect intended to them) are just here to comment 'thanks for the translation' and move on.

 

[Grevados]

There really needs to be a way for non-supporter users to start or get forum discussion threads for new chapters for however long it takes until the new comment system (which I don't like, but this is neither here nor there and not the place for such discussion) is opened up for all users.

There are several chapters that I might want to comment on right now. And I should be able to in the forum setup if that's not going away as promised. But the way things are I can't unless someone who is a supporter makes the thread for it, and that's not a given based on the fact that supporters are free to just use the new embedded comments.

As long as the current tiered setup is confusing and not really explained or laid out well in a public place that users are going to see without having to look for an explanation (so no, the forums' site updates commentary and threads don't really do the job well enough) if the admins want user engagement retained they need to make it easy, explicit, and clear how those users can still use the opportunities available to them, including being able to start a new chapter thread in the forums for series that don't have one yet. Otherwise people are going to get angry because it really looks like the confusion is by design and intended to torpedo the forums and the engagement of non-supporter users for however long this beta period lasts (and the longer it lasts the greater the chance the dissatisfaction ends up having a permanent impact)

I actually came looking for some further information about the non-supporter/uploading users being locked out of chapter commenting because my read on the announcement is that it's a slightly more polite "f-you, pay me" as far as that feature was concerned. No mention that it's a temporary change or any sort of road map of when my ability to comment on chapters would be restored. And for the record, I would happily chip in to support this site but my bank will no allow me to use my debit card to make payments through the required processor, and I will not make a paypal account or get a credit card just for this.

 

[kouyo]

Hello, I received a developer reply regarding some of the suggestions here, I'll be posting them:

I would change it to paginated from infinite scroll.

"This suggestion lacks a reasoning behind it"

The Reply Feature should be changed to make multi-replies possible.

"Comment replies are not a feature yet, the frontend cannot control it."

Way more reaction type emojis are required.

"These are the currently-supported emojis, nothing the frontend can do"

 

[Kosnope]

I know it's harsh criticism and it is demoralizing after so much work

And it should be, nobody asked them to do all this work and ruin+split the community, just spending time / manpower on something doesn't make it acceptable. Should've spent 5% of that time to think about it some more and stop themselves from wasting time on actively making the website worse.
And of course like all modern UI changes, it's obnoxious trash that makes it harder to do the simplest things you've been doing for ages already and which had no need for updates. Never even mind the necessity of this brainrot 'sOciAL sTyLe' short-format comments with ridiculously small window that screams 'pls do low effort spam that has 0 value' - they couldn't simply make a new button to open this crap, no they had to replace the old and good button leading directly to discussions everywhere.

 

[BestBoy]

community,

I believe they are trying to make it easier/more convenient for regular users (the silent majority) to engage in discussion. Currently, less than 10% of users visit the forums for discussion. So, why not bring the discussion to them directly in the chapter?

That's my guess on the idea anyway. No idea if it'll actually work.

 

[Angry_Panda]

I believe they are trying to make it easier/more convenient for regular users (the silent majority) to engage in discussion. Currently, less than 10% of users visit the forums for discussion. So, why not bring the discussion to them directly in the chapter?

From what I've seen, this is one of the factors. Another is how a significant part of the staff feel XenForo is awful to work with and would prefer to be able to moderate the chapter/title comments more easily.

 

[panzerkampfwagyu]

I believe they are trying to make it easier/more convenient for regular users (the silent majority) to engage in discussion. Currently, less than 10% of users visit the forums for discussion. So, why not bring the discussion to them directly in the chapter?

That's my guess on the idea anyway. No idea if it'll actually work.

It is done a bit haphazardly though. Like, I know that "Do it, make it good later" is a perfectly normal development strategy, but it still should be done with a vision of what later is supposed to be like.

From what I've seen, this is one of the factors. Another is how a significant part of the staff feel XenForo is awful to work with and would prefer to be able to moderate the chapter/title comments more easily.

I personally would like to know what the long term plan with Xenforo. I wouldn't be opposed if this thing was part of a long-term strategy of deprecating xenforo and moving the forum into a site-integrated system.
Honestly, they really should just make the new comments their own page, make them have parity with anything XenForo has at the moment, then make it even better and migrate the forum posts into the new system, similar to how old comments were integrated into the Forum when it was readded after V5-1 lacked any social feature due to the Hombre incident, this time, without any data loss as I suspect happened to me.

 

[boursk]

I would change it to paginated from infinite scroll.

"This suggestion lacks a reasoning behind it"

It would be an easier way to navigate through the comments. Say there are 20 "pages" worth of comments and you know you've read up to page 12, you could instantly load up page 12 instead of going through the other pages. It's more user friendly and it would reduce the load on the backend trying to retrieve comments the user isn't interested in anyway.

If you would allow links/references to comments, it would be easier to navigate up and down the comment to read the context and responses. This would synergize with panzer's other suggestion of "multi-replies", which is essentially allowing a single comment to refer to multiple other comments. E.g. how BBCode would have a linkable quote tag or whatever it is that 4chan apparently does:

Maybe they could make it so, that if multiple comments are answered to, the tree instances the comment below all three, while adding references to the post numbers that preview and move the page to the selected post, similar to how 4chan does it.

The current comments flyout doesn't feel particularly nice to read a lot of comments in. It's a very limited space and once people start posting long-form essays in there, it will definitely be rough to go through in that amount of space. Most sites with infinite scroll in their comments section would typically have some kind of most relevant/highest rated ordering to give the user a better selection of comments right off the bat, expecting the user not to go through all the comments. This is why those sites can get away with infinite scroll and restricting comments to fit in a tree-structure; because the ordering will change over time.

I personally don't like that, since I usually read all the comments if I'm interested in reading them for a particular chapter. I do come back to some of them multiple times, especially if I've either uploaded the chapter or posted a comment myself. And that's harder to do if the ordering of comments would change.
If MangaDex is not going to implement a similar system where the ordering of comments could/would change, then pagination would make more sense, due to the reasons given in the first paragraph and potentially the second paragraph.

 

[Dverin_Oshiban_Duren]

Can the new comments be viewed in different orders or with filters?
Like newest to oldest, oldest to newest, most reacted, etc?
That would be nice to have if it's scrolling only y'know?

 

[jeremymd]

is it just me or do i really need to spend money to participate in the newer per-chapter comments now?