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.
One thing I could recognize from your concern is the fact that the "Read N more comments on the forums" (the "older" wording will get amended) link at the bottom of the on-site comments could be buried if there's a lot of comments posted. For that reason, I got to add a link to the forums on the header of the comments drawer, so it'll always be at a stable place.
Therefore, sorry, but I think having two buttons of equal weight on the reader menu for the same purpose (adding a comment) is not something we can do. Additionally, the comment button on chapter cards cannot open the link to the forums because that'd be confusing and make the user miss any on-site comments made. We're making a lot of updates to this whole flow and a new release is underway to polish a lot of things. For starters, as another user requested, I've made the comment button on the chapter cards open a drawer with the comments list without navigating to the reader. Doing the best I can to make sure it satisfies everyone's needs without throwing every idea in the mix.
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.
My first concern is
how do we pin this to all the other forum threads that actually needs this very post to be read, because this huge water tank of a correspondence is the kind that's truly needed to manage the fires that the current implementation had caused, and not the water buckets that's been handed to the other staff to convey.
I do agree that forum integration would be the ideal, I should know, I've been there. It was and still is, shall we say
the dream. But all of that is still far off on the horizon, not with the current state of things, and
these suggestion that I made are merely asking for a workable compromise for the time being as we, the community as a whole, slowly head towards
that dream.
Arguably, it wouldn't really matter if commenting is not as convenient. People that would comment will go through the effort to be able to do so. If we're only talking about engagements, then people that want to engage will find a way.
Let's not forget that the majority of users are guests that are here to read, and most of the time
only read. Even if they made an account, that doesn't necessarily mean they would participate as a quick look at the list of long-time members with zero to low post counts in the forums should be able to tell you. Like videos in a certain media platform, the amount of views does not necessarily match the amount of comments.
People that would engage, will engage, regardless of the method.
It should be obvious that the new system still need more time in the kitchen(canary) before reaching the floor(live), because with the unfortunate series of mishaps that occurred not helping (insufficient details in the notice board, poor choice of words, glaring bug that prevented Group3 users from making threads, etc.), not only did people thought there's a new wall separating them and the paying supporters, everyone saw that the meat is still half-cooked.
We all painfully understand all too well how inferior services had led to people flocking over to better ones, people still prefer the forums for a reason, no more words need be said after that.
My second concern is with the current iteration of the new system, the style draws it further and further away from being able to have deeper meaningful discussion seemingly in favour of shorter and often hollow one-offs. Most chapter discussions have "thanks for the chapter" level of posts in the first few pages, this works fine with the current style, but that, I reckon, is not where the meat and potatoes of the discussions lie. We have various examples of walls-of-text posts that doesn't fit the current style, with the length of this reply alone, should this be in the chapter discussions sub-forum, a post this long isn't unheard of and should pass as an example. Try fitting this bad boy in the new comment window, see how it compares when in the forum environment. Simply put...
The current style is not built for discussions, and that's what I believe is behind the insistence of people to keep using the forums for discussions in the first place.
Following the words of other like-minded members...
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.)
That would be the dream, tbh.
Make it a forum+
Make it a forum+ devs, this I believe should be the way.
