Our comments system is changing, and Gameological is coming home to the mothership
On Monday, we’ll be switching over our commenting system to the new version of Disqus. We’ve resisted making this change for quite a while, because we prefer the look and feel of our current Disqus system, complete with our little additions and workarounds. But alas, starting next week, Disqus will no longer support it, and we’re being forced, kicking and screaming, into the future.
The changes, thankfully, aren’t terribly huge or intrusive, and we’re hopeful that you’ll adapt to them the same way you adapted to the switch from our old, buggy system to the current Disqus. Though sometimes we forget to say it, we value the commenting community here—it’s a major factor in what makes this The A.V. Club.
So, what’s different, you ask? The look is slightly different—we won’t have the nice boxes around comments, but they thread in the same way. There will be no more “like” button; it’s been replaced with up- and down-voting. (We’ll encourage people to ignore the down-voting button—if something is over the line, please continue to flag it.) You can also “star” an overall discussion on any given story, basically allowing you to favorite and follow it. Of course, you can still sort by oldest and newest, thus avoiding the whole up and down business altogether.
Comments will no longer be paginated—there’s simply a “load more comments” button at the bottom of the screen—and comments will update in real time (meaning new comments will appear without you reloading the page). We will have the same number of levels for threading (four—the original comment plus up to three levels of replies).
You will be able to keep your user name and avatar, and all of your old comments will be ported over to the new system. You will no longer have a profile page on The A.V. Club, but that’s something we may revisit in the future. You will have a Disqus profile clickable from our site, so you can still see all of your comments in one place (or somebody else’s comments, if you so desire).
Again, hopefully not too jarring a change, and potentially a smoother experience overall. We trust you’ll let us know—in the comments, naturally—if anything is going completely awry with the new system. Here’s a link to the Disqus page called “Helping You Make The Transition To A New Life.” (No, it’s not actually called that.) If you want to see the New Disqus (which ain’t that new, really) in action, pop over to Wired.com (here’s an article worth checking out over there); they’ve been using it for a while.
In other big news, our sister site The Gameological Society is being folded into the mothership of The A.V. Club slowly over the next month, at which point something else big and cool will happen, too, but we're not ready to talk about that quite yet. Gameological has been going for 18 months under the direction of John Teti, and it will continue to provide excellent, insightful coverage of the games world, just under our big ol' umbrella. John wants to tell you more over at Gameological, including news about his imminent move to Chicago. That's it! Enjoy your weekend when you get there, okay?