When browsing the “Latest Comments” tab on the home page, nested comment threads can become a hassle when they gather many responses and become extremely lengthy.
The “Knightly Duty” series has become especially egregious about this, with some commenters writing essays rivaling the length of a modest-sized story, and commenting at such length repeatedly in threads that sometimes span dozens of comments.
This means when one wants to browse the latest comments to see what people are writing about other stories than Knightly Duty, they have to scroll past giant walls of text that they had already read in the latest comments a day or two earlier. At the moment I’m typing this, the top of the latest comments is a thread that has grown to five thousand words in total across 24 comments by three users in only the last three days. This is a nuisance to other readers!
I want to suggest that when a nested comment thread gets longer than three or so replies, intervening comments between the original and the latest should be consolidated down to simply a “see more” link. Thanks for your consideration of the matter.
Agreed! Although there’s also a question of when should a discussion move from comments to a forum thread. After all, is this not the same series that “broke the comments system” a few months ago?
Funny you mention this… I was just thinking yesterday that the admin team may need to reach out to the author of “Knightly Duties” about this again. The comment chains do continue to overwhelm the Comments tab with every chapter… It’s really just that our comments section is not built for these kinds of long-flowing, essay-style conversation threads. And nor should it be! We aren’t Reddit. In fact, us being able to easily scan all recent site comments via the Comments tab is a feature I really like. Unfortunately it does mean that the story’s long-flowing comments disrupt the site experience for others, since it’s making it impossible to scan the Comments tab in a reasonable way…
I’m going to reach out to the author and ask that he turn off comments for his stories, going forward, and instead redirect all the discussion to a dedicated forum thread that he links to at the bottom of each chapter. I hope this will allow the current readers to continue their in-depth conversations on the story without too much disruption to both their flow and to other readers’ experiences of the site.
In that case, single comments (not replies) to the story would also solve the problem. The long queue of replies and re-replies are the problem, as they always pull the whole thread up to the top of the comment list.
Single comments to the same story just would show up as a single comment, not as the whole queue.
I’m just seeing this thread right now, and I must say I’m really sorry for the problem my stories cause. I will make sure to redirect longer comment for my stories to the forum from now on.
In fact, us being able to easily scan all recent site comments via the Comments tab is a feature I really like. Unfortunately it does mean that the story’s long-flowing comments disrupt the site experience for others, since it’s making it impossible to scan the Comments tab in a reasonable way…