Hey all – quick update to Kevin’s last post on our recently released comment system. We just pushed a revision that addresses a lot of the feedback we heard. The major changes of note are:

1.) You can now set how many threads you wish to view, by default, in your profile. Visit your profile page and click on the ‘Profile’ tab to edit your comment settings.

2.) If you’re logged in and viewing comments in the default view with threads collapsed, we pre-fetch the more popular threads behind the scenes. This means instantaneous (if they’ve finished loading) display when clicking ‘View replies’. We’re still looking into pre-fetching all replies, but need some more time to test.

3.) We no longer collapse the child thread when you bury its parent comment.

4.) The reply form at the bottom of all threads is now collapsed by default.

Thanks to everyone who provided feedback and reported bugs – keep them coming!

Joe

The cool thing about having millions of people using your site, is that there is never a lack of feedback. Right now we’re taking it all in – the good and the bad – and are actively making changes to the new comments feature we launched yesterday. But before we go into that, we’d like to ask you to use the new system for a few days, and give us constructive feedback that we can act on (in this related Digg story to this post) – and we’ll continue to work on changes that address everyone’s concerns.

What we’ve already changed:
- Expand All: We are now exposing this option at the top of each comments thread. One click turns it on.
- Animation speed: We took out the fade, comments will expand down faster.

Give us a little more time for:
- Speed: We will pre-fetch comments so that expanding them (if not already expanded) will be instantaneous. Due to some memcache issues (server caching) this is going to take us some time to figure out.
- Saved preferences for comments view options: We will make this a fixed global profile setting – we’ll remember and make your comment view selection global until you change it.
- Reply-to open: We’ll close this by default, making things less cluttered

Stuff we need your feedback on:
- How many levels of threads do you want -1,2,5?
- Should we remove the thread lines?
- What other changes would you like to see?

So, to sum it all up, thank you for all your feedback and patience. Kick back, enjoy some coffee, use the comments, and continue giving us your suggestions.

Thanks,

Kevin

Hey everyone – after a couple days of troubleshooting we’re finally live with our new comments system. For those of you who have been actively using Digg and requesting updates to comments, the wait is over – much faster page load times, better threading, and in-line replies. Also, check out the viewing options to change how comments are displayed.

If you want to look under the hood, check out posts that our own Daniel Burka wrote on the design and Joe Stump wrote on technical implementation.

Hey everyone – quick post to let you know that in the midst of going live with some back-end upgrades as well as our new comments system, the site has had a longer than expected outage tonight.  We’re deep into the fixes and should have them done soon. In the meantime, we don’t want to interrupt your Digging any longer so we’re reverting to the current version of the site until we get the kinks worked out.

On a related note, we’ve been working for several months on a full Disaster Recover site for Digg.  Once operational, our DR site will let us make site updates without interruptions – and in tonight’s case where things went haywire, you’d never know we were making updates at all.

Apologies for the inconvenience and frustration this has caused any of you – we should have the new features up soon.

Digg on,

Kevin

Hey everyone, just wanted to let you know about the latest collaboration project that Digg recently finished. I worked with the developers at Facebook and we launched a application that you can install to your Facebook Profile!

For now, the application is just a widget that sits in your profile and shows the last 5 stories that you dugg. It updates each time you digg a story on Digg. To get it to work you need to install it, and link your Facebook and Digg profiles together.

To install it, you can use the interface provided by Facebook, or just go to the following URL: http://www.facebook.com/add.php?api_key=60bc92590c18b6fbff57d8487cf98430

We had a little bit of a rocky start during the Facebook launch of the Application API. Everything seems to have calmed down now and the app is solid. If you installed it before things were working properly, you should be able to fix it by clicking the ‘Connect to your Digg Account’ button that is sitting inside of the application currently. If you don’t see that or it doesn’t work for you for some reason, just uninstall it and then install it again.

There are lots of cool things that we can do with this and the widget you currently see is just the beginning. Install it, and you will automatically get any updates that we make to the functionality in the future.

Eli