We’ve just deployed an upgraded version of our comments tool. This brings a number of changes and new features:
- Anybody without an email address associated with their account (this is people who sign in with Google or Facebook accounts) will be asked to add one. This enables optional email notifications on replies (which you can configure under My Profile->Preferences) and the like for all users, as well as data protection features like the ability to export your data or delete your account.
- Deep reply nesting now works correctly—the depth limit is gone.
- Embedding support has been upgraded. You may now embed up to one of the following in your post. You can configure whether embeds are shown expanded by default under My Profile->Preferences.
- YouTube: paste a URL of the form https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ into your comment and accept the prompt
- Bandcamp: paste a URL of the form https://muskoxofficial.bandcamp.com/album/inheritance into your comment and accept the prompt
- Twitter: paste a URL of the form https://twitter.com/AngryMetalGuy/status/1423616013673930754 into your comment and accept the prompt
- Imgur: paste a URL of the form https://imgur.com/a/qZVjzfB into your comment and accept the prompt
- Images: paste a URL ending in jpg, png or gif into your comment and accept the prompt
- Giphy: click the “+GIF” button below the input field to use Giphy’s gif search
- New comment highlighting is enabled. This is stored locally, not on the server, so if you browse the comments from multiple devices it won’t remember what you’ve read on other devices at the moment.
- There’s now a user bio field you can fill in under My Profile->Preferences, which is displayed if somebody clicks on your name. Link your Bandcamp profile or something if you want.
- You can now see your comment history, including reply counts and who has respected your comments, under the My Profile tab.
- The off topic tag is gone for the time being. This feature isn’t currently available in this version of the comments tool. We may bring it back in future if possible.
- There are also various upgrades to the backend and moderation tools, but the plebians don’t get to see those. :-)
This is a major change and there are likely to be teething issues. As a first step, please try clearing your cache etc if anything is misbehaving. If that fails, please let us know if anything isn’t working.
As usual, huge thanks to the Coral Project, who make having comments that don’t suck and don’t fill the site with adverts without paying through the nose for the privilege possible.
