Better Comment Threads

I finally got around to upgrading the comment threading feature on OmniNerd. The old version showed full threads, sorted in chronological order of top-level comments, oldest first. This wasn't bad, but it wasn't always how I wanted to read a thread.

I think the old way was good if you'd stumbled upon a mature thread and wanted to read it end-to-end. However, if you're actively checking for comments, newest first may make more sense. Or if you've got comments in two sub-threads, you don't want to have to scroll back and forth to keep up.

To help deal with these issues, I implemented several new ways to look at threads:

• sort by age: standard stuff, oldest or newest first
• sort by votes: based on the score of the top-level comment, threads can be sorted lowest or highest vote count first
• verbosity: you can expand all comments like in the old system, or you can choose to only see top-level comments with a link to make any replies appear.

I really like the verbosity feature. Sometimes back-and-forth threads start between two people and end up 20 levels deep and the only people who seem to care are the back-and-forth commenters. Verbosity nicely gets around this. Moreover, it encourages people to reply to the original content instead of a tangent conversation.

Overall, I'm very pleased with this addition. If you've got ideas for additional ways to show comments, I'm all ears.

Star This to Save in Your Profile