If you’ve been a member of Hogs Haven for a while, you are probably aware that the commenting system was changed by SB Nation earlier this year. The new system is called Coral, and was rolled out to the 32 NFL blogs for testing and de-bugging before being rolled out to all the SB Nation blogs at some point in the indefinite future.
The change from the old commenting system to the new was not smooth and not popular, and the developers have been playing catch up since Day 1.
A lot of improvements have been made, but the system has not yet achieved parity with the former system, which is still used on all non-football SB Nation blogs.
There are two items that seem to be at the top of the priority list for members of Hogs Haven and other NFL SB Nation communities: The “Read More of this Conversation” function and the ability (or in the current case, the inability) to find unread comments.
The first of those items will be fixed this week, according to an update from the development team, with the unread comments function coming sometime in the new year.
Here are some excerpts from the email sent by the development team:
Here’s what’s coming in the latest update this Friday:
We’ve removed ‘Read more of this conversation’! Yeah, we know. It wasn’t great. From Friday, no longer will ongoing conversations be pushed to another page. Instead, when they hit a certain depth, the view stays flat, and you can see who is replying to whom. This was developed in conjunction with our Feedback Group. Like everything we do, it’s a work in progress. We’ll be watching to see how it’s used, and how we can make it better. Let us know what you think.
You can now see who’s Rec’ing your comments. Inside the ‘My Profile’ tab (where your comment history and notifications are), all your comments with Recs will now have a small arrow - click that to see who’s appreciating what you’re putting down.
There’s a keyboard shortcut to quickly post a comment. We know what it’s like when you’re typing fast on Game Day and you just want to say it without moving the mouse. Hitting CONTROL-ENTER now posts your comment quick-smart without having to click ‘submit’.
Better navigation. When you hit the bottom of the comments, you can now jump to the Discussions or Profile tab via a couple of easy links right there.
I suspect that first change will make a lot of people happy.
The change that I’d most like to see is still beyond the horizon, but is promised as a future delivery, some time in 2021:
Unread comments / Z Key. We hear you on this one, loud and clear. We’re working on it.