Some readers have noticed that we have been making changes to the site lately and have had questions/issues. Rather than having comments all over the place and being informed multiple times of issues I thought I’d quickly make this post to outline what changes we are making and why.
All of the current changes we are making are designed to make the site load faster for everybody. This will also make the backend easier for Chuck & I to use as often if the server is overloaded the backend is extremely slow to load making comment moderation and other tasks difficult.
Community is a big focus of this site and it’s the readers that make it great, but in particular we are trying to improve the comment system. This involves deferring the loading of comments until the rest of the webpage loads, readers have said that this feels like a ‘stutter’ but in reality the webpage should be loading quicker and then the actual comments load. The overall waiting time should be the same or even quicker than before.
More Recent Comments
Another thing that takes up a lot of server resources is the more recent comments page. This cannot be cached as new comments are being added to the site constantly. Ideally readers would use an rss feed and feed reader for comments. We are trialing different methods and are open to ideas and thoughts on how readers actually use this page. A few thoughts of my own:
- It seems some people just use this to find hot posts that they might have skipped. For example a bank bonus that might not be listed as nationwide will often have a lot of comment activity. We could then simply replace this with comment activity on posts over the last 12/24 hours.
- We could reduce the amount of comments shown and push readers to use an rss feed if they wanted more. 100 comments is obviously a lot, by reducing this to 25 and still offering an rss feed hopefully most people are happy.
What’s Next
We are making these changes largely because we want to add more functionality in the future. Roadmap includes:
- User accounts
- Improved referral threads (e.g must have an account to leave your referral. This will hopefully mean referral threads can be left open indefinitely and spam is reduced)
- Ability to ignore users
Feel free to add anything else you’d like to see added.
