Earlier this week, Massively OP reader Sally asked us for an update on what’s changed with the comment system recently. Since then, I’ve been able to put together a solid list of some bits and bobs that we’ve finally knocked off the to-do list. Most of them revolve around things we didn’t like about the native media embedding system. Here’s what’s new down below the bylines.
- Automatic reply notification just to comments you’ve personally made is in (again). You can turn it off when you post if you really wanna drop a bomb and not ever hear the explosion. :P This may be reverted if we get a lot of pushback about it from people who don’t want to keep turning it off, but we’ve had good feedback from it so far.
- Video embedding is in, at least from YouTube. Just drop the link straight into a comment, no other effort required. Two minor issues remain: You have to refresh after posting to see it, and it squishes a bit if you’re posting deep into nested comments. (This was originally disabled because it borked up videos in posts, but that has been fixed. Exhibit E down below.)
- Social embedding is in, including embeds like WordPress post links and tweets and Reddit posts, which will automatically expand if you just drop them into a comment, no code needed. Facebook doesn’t work. This can be spammy if you use too many of them in a single post, so use it sparingly. You will need to refresh after posting to view it properly. (Exhibits B, C, D, and K below.)
- Multi-link posts with five or fewer links should no longer go straight to the moderation queue. If this gets abused or we get hit with a spam wave, we may need to change it back, but so far, spam has been minimal — this is one of the major benefits of our admittedly complicated account creation system. If you want to post more than five links at a time, post them in replies or drop me a quick note so I can approve you immediately.
- Single-image uploads should now display properly in comments as scaled-down rather than cropped or uglified versions of the original. This is the thing I’m most proud of y’all. It should primarily help One Shots posters and you meme-junkies as you should no longer need to upload single images externally and link them into comments to force them to display properly without a click. (Exhibit H and J below.)
- Multi-image comments will still display those images in a gallery, but now you can upload eight per post, and they’re a bit larger than they used to be. (Exhibit G below.)
- Single-image embeds should now expand without effort just like Twitter and YouTube links. You don’t need IMG tags anymore, so I presume that is why the plugin designer removed it from the comment editor UI. Just pop in the image link and it’ll show up. Boom. Hotlinking like it’s 1999. (Exhibit A down below.)
- Spoiler code — I think this is new as of a week or two ago when we had a general plugin update. Make sure you “close” the code with [/spoiler]. This is a great way to handle it if you want to dump in a ton of links like so. (Exhibit F down below.)
- Captchas — I have had one report about captchas in the comments causing weirdness. Here’s the thing: We don’t have captchas in the comments, and in fact we don’t even have that module purchased or installed, but bugs gonna bug! If anything weird like that happens to you, try to record as much info about the issue as you can and send it into us so we can try to track down what is going on there.
What isn’t ready yet that you are likely to care about? Donor badges and the login overhaul. Work continues on both, along with a dozen other things, but those are the most important and next up.
Feel free to break things — I’ve added some examples in the comments already.
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