Two new site features and a redesigned interface
- Private Messages. Finally you are now able to message another user on the website. It has been something that has been talked about for awhile, but finally added ths week. Private messages here show you if/when the user has read the message sent.
- Profile DropDowns. This is only accessible to registered users so I will provide a screen shot below. Each user will have a [+] next to their name with more options such as “Send Message” or “View Comments”. As users get more and more features, this dropdown menu was needed to make quick navigation much easier.
The site has undergone a rather significant facelift in the past week. I have been playing around with photoshop for several months now and decided to redesign some of the interface and graphics. If you look at the picture above, I have enhanced the thumbs up / down icons to make them more visible. The header image, navigation bar, and background image have all been redone. Enjoy the much much prettier celebritypwn.
Threaded Comment System Critique
There has been a lot of talk about web 2.0 websites for the past 2 to 3+ years. Most people seem to think that web 2.0 is just shiny graphics and JavaScript. Scratch that. . . A LOT of JavaScript. The idea of nested, or threaded, comments has been around since forums first hit the web.
Browse to just about any popular site and you will notice that 90% allow some form of user interaction via voting or comments. The websites that do allow comments, maybe 1% to 5% have threaded comments . Look at myspace.com, facebook.com, youtube.com, espn.com, and flickr.com. None of those sites even ATTEMPT threaded comments. So then what sites do use thread comments?
Most of the sites that use threaded comments happen to be social new sites. Lets take a look at some of the bigger named sites: Digg.com, Newsvine.com, Reddit.com, and Netscape.com. These sites are all about user input, so their comment systems should be cutting edge and very user friendly. I’m going to also include Slashdot.org, although its a bit different than those mentioned. I will grade their comment systems on a scale A – F.
- Digg.com – C+. Comment system is unorganized, needlessly complex, and frankly… abuses javascript. (Show/Hide anyone?) It is impossible to follow a conversation because of various bars of blue colors. The site has been credited as leading the social news website revolution, yet just recently made their first attempt at true threaded comments. They promise to make more changes, but I highly doubt the site will ever clean up their system enough to satisfy most users.
- Newswine – D-. Comment system is readable but is not truly threaded. It seems as though comments can only go 1 thread deep. There doesn’t seem to be a way to hide comments with a negative score either. It is ugly and too basic. Sorry, that won’t cut it.
- Reddit.com – B+. Conversations are fairly easy to read and they have a markup language that users are able to utilize. It looks as though threads can go as deep as they want. I would give this website an “A” if the comments didn’t have so much whitespace in between them. If they tweaked it visually, then it would be just about perfect. The best feature for me is the fact that users get notified when someone replies to their comment.
- Netscape – A. The model which other sites and developers should look towards to developing a proper threaded comment system. Threads can go as deep as they want on this site as well. Readability for a conversation is very good and with plenty of comment options. Perhaps the amount of text and icons on the right side can make a reader feel a bit overwhelmed at times? Despite that, I am very impressed with Netscape’s comment system.
- Slashdot.org – B-. This reminds me of an old school type threaded comment system. There is nothing wrong with that, but just not my cup of tea. A user has to click on reply-to threads that loads another screen to read the comment. Also, the header of the comments is a bit too big and doesn’t really help with the flow. Their unique take to critique comments as “Funny”,“Informative”, etc is a great addition.
Let’s not send me hate mail just yet because your favorite site got a bad rating. Or perhaps I omitted your favorite site? In case you are wondering… I use both Digg and Reddit. Keep in mind that I do not consider myself an expert. If anything, I am barely a competent amateur programmer/web designer. However, I have developed my own threaded comment system from scratch. That is essentially the reason why I wrote this article. I had plenty of time to study what I liked/disliked from other comment systems. I would rate my celebrity gossip’s comment system but it would be impossible for me to be objective. So why don’t you guys go ahead and do that 
How Popular are You?
No, I don’t mean how popular you are at work or at school. No one cares about that. I am talking celebritypwn popularity. Of course this matters most. The idea for celebritypwn popularity is pretty simple, if people like what you say then your popularity will increase. Now users can compare themselves for highest level or highest in popularity. I am fairly certain that no other website has this (unless they steal it from me of course). I have to thank terri for the idea to bring this to the site.
Now, its time for a list of changes and tweaks:
1) Stats Page. Due to the new category of popularity I had to make changes to the Site Stats page. There is now a page for Site Users and Site Celebrities. On the site users page you may sort by Level or Popularity.
2) Comment Notifications Tweaked. On the “Comment Notification” page, users will be directed towards the exact comment that was replied to or just posted. Previously it would just direct you to the story and you’d have to find it yourself. This began to get very confusing when a PWN would have several conversations you may have been involved with.
3) Vote Spy. Vote spy has been updated to properly display comment voting. Previously it only displayed PWN voting.
4) Bug fixes. There were some bugs with comment voting that I still had to fix. All is well now
Comment System July Update
Major new feature to the comment system. Users can now vote for or against user comments. I have been wanting to add this feature for sometime but kept putting it off. There have also been a few visual tweaks so comments are easier to read.
Registered users will notice the changes right away. Each comment has green ‘+’ or red ‘-’ icons that handle the voting. If a comment has less than 1 point, then it is automatically hidden. The comments that are hidden will have a “show/hide” link so you can still read and reply to them.
In the future, I intend to award extra points to users with comments that have +5 points. However, right now that doesn’t seem feasible until the user base grows.
Also, I am aware of visual quirks for IE users. I am trying to remedy those minor problems.
