I have redesigned the comments box on the Wardman Wire to include a number of options including threaded comments, notification of new comments by email, a preview of the comment as you type, the ability to make the box larger or smaller, and others.

Background

Making the Wire easier to use for commenters has been on the agenda for some time, for several reasons:

• Making it easy for visitors to interact is more likely to bring them back.
• I’ve had my eye on threaded comments for some time - as I find it makes the occasional long conversations more understandable. The site is now on a new version of Wordpress and - joy of joys - experiments with Brian’s Threaded Comments have proved successful.
• Importantly, this blog has quite a diverse audience covering several niches - and that makes building a “community” somewhat more difficult than for a more tightly focused site. Ease of use and ease of interaction should help mitigate that difficulty.

Today Ian Whickham of “Question That” (highly recommended, by the way) twittered that he would like a “preview while I type” facility - so I’ve spent a few hours sourcing and installing some new plugins to give this and other features.

Oodles of Options

These are the options you now have (and a reference to the Wordpress plugins I am using to provide them):

Threaded Comments

I have used Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin to allow you to answer to particular comments - rather than just to reply to the whole thread. This plugin requires Javascript to be turned on.

Link back to your last Headline

The Commentluv plugin (with an excruciating name) adds a link to your last article to the bottom of your comment. For this to work, you have to enter a valid web address when adding your details to the comment, and the site has to be able to find your RSS feed successfully in order to extract the first headline.

Comment Notification by Email

There is a box which allows you to opt to be notified of further comments added to the thread.

Highlight Author Comments

I have used the “Highlight Author Comments” plugin to make it easier to keep track of the conversation.

Live Comment Preview

Ian’s particular request was for a preview of comments as you type. This is the aim of the Live Comment Preview plugin. This plugin requires Javascript to be turned on.

Resizable Comments Box

You can now resize the comments box if you wish to make a long comment. This feature requires Javascript to be turned on.

Gravatars

This is a function of Wordpress 2.5 rather than a plugin. If you use the Gravatar service to provide an online icon, that is now used by the Wardman Wire.

Wrapping Up

In addition to all the above, you can still subscribe to the overall comments feed for the site.

In my testing it all seems to work, but do me know what you think by stress testing the comments box below.