Make the new comments system into a "Forum+"

[shinya78]

Yup, I'm going to make it official.
The title is in honor of @panzerkampfwagyu 's post that made me lose it for 3 minutes straight.
Please consider this as an official suggestion.

Hey, dev here. Even though I don't bear the positive news you want to hear, I still think it's good to drop a reply here in light of you being honest and taking the effort to level your suggestions while also considering the general UX.

I'd like to start with our motivation. Basically, we want to put the engagement adjacent to the content, just like every other platform does. Right now, even though it has been the case for years, it's not so straightforward to comment. You need to be redirected to another site (forums), and log in again if you haven't already (and if it's your first time on the forums, agree to the specific forum rules).

An argument against a separate system would be to integrate the forum comments within our main site's UI, but for technical reasons this proved to be a bad idea the longer we delved into it. A new, clean system was a far better bet given our resources.

We do want to keep the forums, which is why we're still linking to them on the chapter comments drawer, and based on current consensus, we plan to continue to do so even after the comments have been enabled for everyone.

However, two systems cannot coexist with the same weight because the regular users will get confused and wonder what it is they should use. In such case, as a developer, you need to choose which to encourage. It makes sense to encourage the kind that is right next to the content because that is the easier way for the user to comment.

From what I can tell, you don't wish for the new on-site comments to undermine the forums for discussions. I don't know how it'll end up in the future, and I can't guarantee anything that I can't personally make sure will or will not happen. If it helps, the comments on-site are going to get better with more features.

I don't often post here but yeah thank you for looking out for the site, and sorry I couldn't get your suggestions to implementation.

I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, users DO NOT like the style/direction that the new comments system is heading towards to. If the dev team still INSIST with pushing for this new system, in favour over the old forum system, then let this be where we meet in the middle.

I'll be quick, and simple.
Make the new system not too different to the old forum system. I'm not going to tell the team to completely import the XenForo system into the new system, but to just make the new system resemble the familiar forum environment.

To the user currently reading this, I encourage you to cast your vote if you agree. If you want to add a suggestion on top of it then you are free to do so. If you want to let the dev team know that you want them to abolish the new system altogether instead, then state your reasons yet keep your post civil at the very least. The dev team are humans too, and any unnecessary negativity will only take us nowhere. If you want to just meme... please read the room, appropriate memes only please.

Beyond this point, I will let the other users take over and let their voices be known. I will leave this thread with a few quotes from users that already felt the same way, and I sincerely hope the devs and the users could come to a positive conclusion.

I feel out of the loop. Way back in the before times, we used to have forum-style integrated comments. Why can't we just do that? Why is it either forum comments or integrated social-media-styled comments? Am I stupid?

That would be the dream, tbh.
Make it a forum+

tl;dr: please integrate xenforo comments into the reader and call it a day. if that's not an option, please do not reinvent the wheel—keep the current structure of the forums and comments the same in the new system. (also pls fully abandon the corpo slop aesthetic/mindset when designing and refining the new social system.)

Basically, I, too, would prefer a custom, non-XenForo implementation of the forum structure to whatever you are aiming for right now.

 

[Aono_kun]

Have the devs given any reason (directly or via messengers) why they didn't look for/make a replacement forum system for the current XenForo system instead of making a completely new SNS-style comment system?

 

[BestBoy]

reason

It's in Ataraxic's 2nd paragraph.

 

[HaikenEdge]

Have the devs given any reason (directly or via messengers) why they didn't look for/make a replacement forum system for the current XenForo system instead of making a completely new SNS-style comment system?

Enshitification.

 

[Mangamoz]

With how almost no one is actually using the new comments, I wonder if they will give up on them.

 

[Lunkli]

I'm definitely on the side that dislikes the new system, but one thing I think is important to keep in mind here is that if the integrated system is made to mimic the existing forums, (and if it does this well) then the death of the actual forums is practically guaranteed.

There are a lot of chapter discussions and series discussions and miscellaneous threads that would basically be lost, and while these could be copied into the new system to a certain extent, what about threads like this one? The whole point of the integrated comments is that they are directly associated with a chapter or series, but threads like this are not, and basically have no place in such a new system.

Plus, I think that there're a lot of benefits to compartmentalizing the forums and the reader. Not every user of the site is going to want to discuss the manga they're reading, and not everyone uses the forums exclusively for discussing the manga they're using the reader to read.

The distinction also allows for different pages styles, allowing the reader to be more image-optimized, using more buttons and interactables, and the forums to be more text-optimized, using more links and plain text. Image the "similar threads" menu here in the forums in the style of the reader's "recommendations" tab and vice-versa. While each works decently enough as they are now, switched they'd be kind of nonsensical, right?

A manga reader and a forum are just two very different sorts of sites, and so they have different purposes and design philosophies. I think that's a good justification for keeping the two separate.

And I think that there are still ways that the devs can get the reader-discussion integration that they want without completely killing the forums. But the direction they're going of creating a new system of comments integrated directly into the reader is not going to get them to that point. This is the wrong road to get there entirely.

 

[cybeast21]

I really don't like the new system, or social media style comment in general.

User likes the forum system, and if Xenforo is sh*t system, why not search for replacement forum system?

(on that note, why would a site that's basically hosting lot of "illegal" (as in, not officially allowed / pirated / whatever) content wants engagement in the first place?)

 

[Picks]

With how almost no one is actually using the new comments, I wonder if they will give up on them.

TBF, there's only a small subset of users that can use them currently. We have yet to see what actual public uptake will look like.

Being on the forums is a bit of an echo chamber, if only because everyone posting here is already a forum user (and we hate change). I think it'll be an interesting test to see how many lurkers are out there that will convert to commenters and use the comment system when they wouldn't use the forums previously. Personally, I think if someone wanted to comment, they'd already be in the forums commenting, and I've never seen (nor looked for, tbf) a post complaining about 'accessibility' or the need to log in to the forums or whatever and so I don't think we'll see any major uptake. But as I said before, it'll be interesting to see what happens regardless.

I do wonder if this feature would have had more utility if it were title based discussion rather than chapter based. Anecdotally, I never really read the discussion in the title forum thread. Only the chapter ones. If this new feature replaced the need for the title thread and the posts/discussion was persistent across chapters then I could see more use for it. Kind of a rolling discussion of the story as a whole rather than just the events of the specific chapter (though the discussion would naturally bent towards the current chapter). As it is, this new system is competing for established functionality when there's neglected territory that it could occupy.

 

[Angry_Panda]

I do wonder if this feature would have had more utility if it were title based discussion rather than chapter based.

There are (old style) forum title threads (which you know about), and there are also (new style) title comments.

Spoiler: Big pics