Interesting. So apparently I'm one of the few people who preferred their comments chronologically? For things like holidays or achievements, I like the ability to go through comments and see what is/is not currently working, not just an old-but-highly-rated method that may or may not still be good. On a more historical note, it allows one to see and track changes that have occurred over the years. I had no idea that people were abusing upvote/downvote reputation, so breaking that is a good thing. That said, I'd prefer to be able to downvote replies again. As things stand, it will leave a huge gaping hole for trolls (or just incorrect/bad replies) to exploit. Upvote/downvote button size. Thinking back, you're correct, and the first few times I visited the site I had difficulties finding the vote buttons. Personally, I'd prefer something a tad smaller than the current, but it's your site to change and the new buttons certainly do accomplish what you wanted them to! The ability to change your vote is great! There's been a couple of times when I hit the wrong button by mistake.Thank you for deciding to bring the green text for high-rated comments back! Or some other color. Honestly, the shade doesn't really matter. If you want to make high-ranked comments...oh, say, purple in order to distinguish them from the new Sticky feature, then we'll probably complain about it for a bit and then adapt. :-D It's just that some way to scan the page and pick out the 'good' comments was always nice; esp if you're one of the wierdos like me who prefer to keep the pages in chronological order.If you don't mind me asking, why did you remove the "Default comment sort" option from the User Settings page? I realize that Wowhead will remember that I clicked 'sort by date' on a spell/item/whatever page and keep that active whenever I go to another page (btw, has this last bit not been implemented yet? Or am I completely hallucinating that you said this?), BUT I tend to clear my cache frequently and having to click on it every time I re-visit the site could get a little old. Having to click on it EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. I visit ANY page is going to get even older. I suppose I'll get used to it in time, it's more of an annoyance/quality-of-life thing than it is a full-blown complaint. Quick clarification? "If you find an old reply automatically converted to a comment that doesn't make sense without being associated with the comment it was replying to please report it to the moderators." Are the mods more likely to delete the comment or to somehow 'cram' the comment back into a reply slot to the original comment? I've got a couple of replies that got divorced from their original comments and I'd kinda like to know before I report them.Just curious, why change a post's starting rep to 0 instead of 1? "Comments with negative rating are no longer automatically purged. They will appear at the bottom of course, but they will still be there to be improved or deleted by the OP." Except in a VERY few instances (think: the trolls who showed up after Ephoenix/Ezra Chatterton died), I approve; PARTICULARLY as a red comment can now be upvoted once again. There's been quite a few comments (not mine) I thought were good that got downvoted into oblivion. (A symptom of that vote-rep abuse you mentioned earlier?)Low priority, but is there any chance that you'll consider a button or Account Setting that will shift deleted comments from the end of the line to their original positions? Deleted or not, sometimes these comments shed light on existing highly-ranked comments. Like any change, this one has its good and bad points, along with the 'oh no, CHANGES!' shock of first noticing it. (Lol, I thought it was a bug at first, since something to do with my cache completely broke the website. Didn't realize that SOME of what I was seeing was intentional until I hit the forums to see if anyone else was having similar issues.) :-D Anyway, thanks for the hard work trying to improve the website!
I'm not a huge fan of the new comments section. This reads more like a social site then one where you can share information. The lack of threading in the new comments section makes it very hard to pick through the comments. It almost seems pointless to read through them now as all the information has been crapped all over the place and I have to keep clicking 'sort by date'.Oh they take up a crapload of space too which makes it really hard to read through them in a concise fashion.
Ok, I just read Alayea's comment a couple above mine. I had no IDEA that there was a website achievement for getting comments deleted. I fully agree with Alayea's argument about removing it. That explains even more than vote-rep abuse why so many good comments were being mysteriously deleted! Please, get rid of them!
It's terrible, to be honest. The replies are too hard to read, and too small of a font by default. Not all of us have fresh new eyes. Also it taking you to the last comment as soon as you click the comments section is bad in my opinion, and when you click on a comment in your rep/history, it doesn't actually take you to your comment anymore.
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
I don't like the new reply-display at all.Worst of all is that now I see all the old and outdated crap again, which was hidden before.If I am searching for something, I waste tons of time.- Exactly the way it should not be.
This change was not properly communicated to the user base. In the nearly two years I have used Wowhead, I visited the forums twice: once to report the Java issue, and once to see if there were hints about the hidden achievements. I come to Wowhead to read, post, and upload information to the database. I visit multiple times per day. I am completely flummoxed as to why such a huge change was not announced on the front page.I also take issue with the new ratings display/UI. However, they take up too much screen. I understand the (probable) reason for this is the philosophy of ordering by highest to lowest ratings; this necessitates making the ranking very visible. Still, I feel that having the rating in-line with the comment is much more economical.
All I can say is that I've been actively utilizing this site since early '07. I personally don't feel that this is an improvement over what it replaced. That might just be because of how long I've been using the sight in its former incarnation versus its current one.This change is brutally jarring. It was quite a shock, to say the least. Like that April fools joke you guys got me with back in April of '08, when you changed the front page to read Wowhead but stylized it after the golden dragon thottbot theme with the white background..The only real complaint I had about the former version (but kept to myself) was after the vote deleting system was implemented pages and pages and pages of comments were just filled with collapsed comments tagged with "deleted" in red text. Why not just keep the old system and have deleted/purged comments auto dropped to the bottom of the comment list?If that isn't a possible and this new system is here to stay, at the very least move the upvote/downvote arrows to the right of the screen.Also, I feel that serious consideration should be giving towards increasing the rep required for even initiating a delete vote to exalted. Its easily the strongest priv the site offers to normal users. The best reward for the highest rep rep? It just makes sense.
ugh. The more this site rips off StackExchange the more I don't like it. StackExchange is great and I'm a big reputation holder on a bunch of their network sites, but it doesn't work for this site. Achievements are just annoying but now you took the rating system too. See, how StackExchange works is by encouraging good questions and replies through the up/down vote system. Comments to Qs or As are just comments. Here, there is some mini threading going on which works great, but making them "Comments" that can' t be downvoted makes no sense. Also the green text is very helpful and hardly arbitrary. Again, I don't like this move to clone StackExchange but haven't really commented on any of the changes. But these recent changes are just awful.
The look of the change is quite nice, and I heartily welcome the decision to no longer give rep for voting - that idea was deeply flawed, and I had seriously considered completely quitting the site over it.To the comments changes...The vote related ordering is fine per se, as good comments rise to the top. However, as it stands relevancy can be lost. For example, something that got 100+ upvotes in BC but only became irrelevant in Cata will take a long time to get voted down, obscuring new comments that are relevant. To solve this, I would sort the comments in decending order of patch (or expansion), and then by votes. I would also add the option to allow to promote a comment from a previous patch to the current patch if it's still relevant. This would allow old comments that are still relevant to be near the top whilst quickly burying out-of-date stuff.Replies... for me this is a tricky one. A reply in itself can be a valid comment and should be treated as such, because in a lot of cases they are use to clarify or correct a post that is essentially correct, but has an omission or is slightly unclear. Keeping replies in the original post is a good thing, but effectively reducing their status by making them smaller than the original post makes them less useful. However, the counter argument to this being that more of the trash comments are posted as replies. To combat this, my suggestion would be to add a report for moderation button to the reply. Whether that is restricted by rep or only to the poster of the original comment or is generaly available could be decided. This would however allow a 3rd party to decide if the reply makes sense or is just trash. Again there is an option to have the moderation done by the site mods or it could be done by a group of people with high rep as a panel.An example of how it could work would be that if a reply gets reported for moderation, a few (but odd numbered) qualified users get a message to review a comment and they can vote whether the comment is trash or otherwise by voting and the comment gets deleted or retained based on the result.Finally, I would add my voice to those that would like to see an end to the achievements that relate to performing moderation actions - such as the ones for deleting comments and for voting on comments. These can skew the balance of the person performing these action. Just as there are people who collect achievements in the game, there will be people who do the same here. This in my view is enough to bring into question the action they have taken - even if they have taken it in good faith - as there appears to be an inducement to make the decision that they have. This cannot be good for the overall reputation of the site.I hope that isn't too much of a wall of text!
I appreciate you guys trying to improve and update the site. But I have to say I agree with most of the sentiment above.The old comment system and layout were perfectly fine.. almost perfect even I'd say. It was a reason why I love wowhead. It looked very clear and I liked the chronological order default combined with the green comments. It was easy to find what you wanted fast. It was also a LOT more readable.The new layout is just.. making things a lot more unclear in my opinion. Pulling apart higher rated comments from the lower ones with the new default setting of sorting by rating, some longer replies becoming their own separated comments, and other replies with less words 'hidden' under comments looking like they are a signature of the above comment writer.. I don't think it works. Often a lot of replies refer back to the comment they are posted on, plus they are really just as important -if not more important- than what they are a reply to. Now the bigger replies are separate comments, and many well rated replies look like they are just a footnote to someone else's comment. Hiding any comments over the 5 allowed unless you click a button to see them might also hide a lot of very useful info.. especially when the replies hidden are ones with high rating (you could of course also sort replies by rating, but then you might even lose more sense of what the hell they are replying to, since it could also be a reply to a reply).A lot of high voted comments come from the past and might be outdated, but now show up as 'the most important' comment on top of the page. Yet, I also don't think these comments should be deleted as they are 'out of date'.. As some have said above me, the comments here on wowhead show a history. Of wow and the wowhead community. And it's nice to have all of that still here!I really do not understand why the option to choose sorting by date or rating is removed from our user settings. Now I have to click sort by date on every comment page I visit, yay? :/ Just keep it easy for users to view comments as they want it, don't 'punish' people for preferring the other sorting.The vote count and vote up/down buttons are now on the left side and changed color and size. Left side feels a bit.. awkward, for some reason. Arguably they are now easier to spot for new users as you say, but I don't think the old spot and color were that hidden that a new user would not notice it. I also think the yellow color it had made it stand out more than the pale gray it uses now. Personally I'd move them back to the right and make them stand out in color.I loved the green text. It was so much more easy to see what was best (if you prefer sorting by date like me), please bring it back! (looking at the poll thread in this forum you guys will, yay :) !)I don't mind the 10+ comments being green, they generally take a long time to even get there. Removing the rep associated with comment voting will help with this too. It might be an idea to distinguish the super high voted comments with an even 'better' color though. Gold, purple, pink, another nice shade of green! Or maybe make the color of the vote count number change according to the amount of votes to avoid rainbow text pages ;)I don't get the reasoning behind replies not being able to be downvoted. That just leaves an opportunity for abuse by trolls. Replies are just the same as normal comments in terms of content, except they refer to what someone else said above. They can still be bad, incorrect or useless. We should be able to downvote them.I DO like all the changes you made regarding rep and commenting. Much better. I also like that comments can be made sticky by moderators, though I hope this is something that can be done objectively.I DO love wowhead, you guys are the best :) But please do not feel like you need to drastically change things that are very good in the first place!Yeah.. I know I know, TL;DR.. I'm not very good at being concise am I.. ;)
You can't down rank replies now? What?
WoWhead trying to be Reddit...If someone thinks this new "feature" is good, just take a look at the example http://i.imgur.com/nXole.jpg .Replies actually have no meaning and there's no easy way to track them down or do a thumbs down.Please, let us choose how we view the page since you seriously can't make good decisions...
Woops, I overlooked mod comments earlier in the thread already addressing some of my points above and the improvements they will make on them.. I'm really glad wowhead actually listens to its users and acts fast too, thanks! :)
We are reading your comments and appreciating them, keep them up. Especially staying civilized, it's greatly appreciated =)
Embedding replies within original comment was the worst idea ever. Even worse limiting it to measly 1-liner...You can't rate reply alone, can't report it separately, overall it turn people away from replying, or dealing with comments in general. Or to post replies as separate comments, either making them unclear due to lacking a context, or imposing an additional work on author to hand-craft the quote to preserve the meaning of the reply.I could understand your position as "comments are not supposed to be forum replacement", but honestly i don't see it in any way helpful.If I want to discuss a specific item, why should I turn away and look for other places, than the page dedicated to item itself? It's hardly understandable or intuitive.