Disqus has migrated us without warning to the Disqus 2012 system, as they are retiring the Classic Disqus interface. I cannot read nested comments without severe pain because of my information processing disorder. Here is a tweet.
@disqushelp I really pray you'll implement flat comments as an option. As I can't read nested threads, I'm cut off from such a community.
— Ana Mardoll (@anamardoll) March 15, 2013
I've literally been crying all evening since this happened at Shakesville because I've just been physically barred from the two safe space communities I had: Shakesville and here. I cannot begin to convey how frightening and triggering this experience is for me right now -- I'm literally having an anxiety attack as I type this.
I and the other moderators are looking into alternative commenting engines, which will take time and may turn out to be an added monetary expense to the blog. Please bear with us through this and please be extra-nice to the moderators during this time as we are all very stressed by this. Thank you.
27 comments:
Both/and. Got it.
Re: Twitter. Either way.
And piggybacking off Leum's suggestion, we could stop using the reply feature and the up and downvotes. Which would not fix the issue, because stuff would be threaded. But it would allow us to have sort-of-standard conversations with each other while agitating to get it fixed.
Ana,
Do you want us to tweet our own comments, or just boost your stuff?
What the frak. I was just in the Narnia thread, and I couldn't follow anything! HAAAAAATE. Taking to Twitter.
*hugs* This sucks. This so sucks.
Yeesh. While I don't mind threaded comments, I'm emphatically NOT a fan of comments being arranged by number of upvotes, which they appear to be now, instead of their time of posting. It pretty much wrecks sensible discussion as far as I'm concerned.
Okay, this is... annoying. I'm not even on Tweeter and I'm considering signing up just so I can re-tweet that message to Disqus. Because man, these new threads are difficult to read. I don't have any problems reading threaded comments, but even I think these are horribly incorporated; no user-friendliness at all, everything's just counter-intuitive and I suspect that any protests will be promptly ignored.
Kinda reminds me of when I was looking for a good image editor and made the mistake of trying out the GIMP.
I hope things get better here.
Gods, what the fuck is wrong with them?
It is my understanding that Disqus has completely removed all code/html/css customization options. Everyone has the same Disqus now.
@Loquat - Were I a proper Code Primate, I would probably figure it how to request the data and then put together an HTML/CSS package to make everything display properly. Alas, I don't have the skills for that. The people who do probably cost quite a bit of money to hire.
I am tweeting all these issues at Disqus. For those of you on Twitter, you can follow here: https://twitter.com/anamardoll
And OpenID login has disapeared, so I've lost my account. Lovely.
Also, when I click the "Discussion" box and the dropdown appears, and there's a tickmark beside "Oldest", you might think that means it's sorted by oldest first. And yet the comment thread still makes no sense. I needed to click that again, even though the checkmark was already there, to get any sense out of the comments.
Disqus is now completely broken and utterly useless. Joy.
TRiG.
(There are two textboxes below. A bit of trial and error suggests that one expects a name and the other expects an e-mail adress. It would help if they were labeled, so trial and error were not necessary.)
Silver Adept - Disqus does have an API (http://disqus.com/api/docs/) but I can't find anything it in that would be remotely useful for this purpose. I think we're stuck prodding the company until they change it.
I really hope things get better (With both the commenting system and you).
Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh. Also ugh.
(I have been thinking about starting my own blog, and had been wondering whether it would be a good idea to use Disqus for the comment threads. I think I now have my answer.)
Ana, I hope relief from this problem in some form comes soon.
I presume that Disqus does not offer plug-ins or an API in such that someone could program a "flat view" layout for the comments as they come in and then install it into a webpage. (I guess someone could try to Stylish the comment section, but that seems like using a screwdriver to drive a nail.)
Thanks Kristykat, will use name going forward.
DJ - I usually just type in the person's name, if my comment directly addresses something they've said :)
(Actually, I did that under the old system anyway, because the "replying to" indicator wasn't always visible for me!)
Hi Ana, since we are not going to be using the reply option is there a standard format we can follow to indicate whose comment this is a reply to. I am not a twitter user but don't they do something like @anamardoll:disqus to indicate that this is a reply to that user? Can we do the same?
Ye gods that's all kinds of horrible. Threaded comments are completely unreadable.
I've started a query looking for alternatives to Disqus.
TRiG.
I got just a little sleep last night, during which I dreamed I was hospitalized with the stomach flu, because that's precisely how sick I feel. *lolsob*
Migration options are still in discussion, but they're not looking good. There's a reason why we went with Blogger + Disqus in the first place and those reasons were based less on their feature-richness and more on how the alternative options just don't meet our needs. *sigh* We're continuing to look into things.
How you can help:
1. If you're on Twitter, please retweet the above message to Disqus. (The two arrows chasing each other in the bottom left corner.) If you tweet Disqus directly, please be nice and sweet: they genuinely seem to not be aware of this information processing disability, nor about how our flat-comment community works. I am hopeful that we can encourage them to understand our use case.
2. For here on Ramblings, please do not use the Reply option. Or the votes. This will keep the comments flat and in order. (The vote order can be "fixed" individually through the gray arrow next to the "Discussion" tab on the disqus form.)
Huh. I pretty much never use the reply feature, I think it had something to do with being familiar with Ye Olde Slacktivist, where there was no such thing.
@ Leum
That's a thought, though what we do about the fact that the rest of the threads are completely incomprehensible (at least at 4 am) and do not flow like they used to (not going to be helped by morning) is still a problem.
(As is the new comments appearing at the top no matter what, and the fact that disqus seems to have gone from passively destructive to actively out to get us. For one thing, it didn't like me using "@ Leum" and it keeps reordering comments as it pleases. Whee. Only not whee.)
Could we all just agree not to use the "Reply" feature? It's a stop-gap measure, but it would have the desired effect.
I really hate it when web companies just toss functionality because apparently they just feel like it. All my good hopes for you in finding something that will work.
Here's hoping for the best, for you and your safe places. Keeping this short, I just want to say I appreciate your effort in making this post and maintaining this excellent blog. If there is anything else your followers can do to help, I hope that you will let us know.
Best wishes in times of trouble.
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