The Autopian Is Rolling Out A New Commenting System (With Editing And Notifications) TOMORROW

The New Comments Are Here
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After months of shoving floppy disks into his Apple Lisa, Jason has finally gotten to the last one, and our new commenting system (all 83.4 megabytes!) should deploy some time this evening — certainly by tomorrow! What does this mean for you? Many of the features you’ve asked for will be available. Here are the details.

[Editor’s Note: But first, let’s get into the details of those floppy disks I was shoving into that Lisa, because they’re fascinating. They’re fascinating because they weren’t like other floppy disks of the era, they were weird-ass proprietary disks made by Apple just because they wanted to make their own disks, because of arrogance or madness or glee or all of that. They were called “Twiggy” disks, after the famously thin model, and they were weird. 

They looked weird, they spun at variable speeds, unlike most floppies, and all that weirdness let Apple save about 870K per disk, which is incredible when you remember that the Apple II 5.25″ disks only stored 143K! They were notoriously fragile and unreliable, though, and were a dead end. Still, I’m glad I had enough around to get the new comment system loaded! – JT]

It should just work, but you may have to re-log in

Jason (actually, our wonderful tech team at Jazel) has worked hard to make this as seamless a transition as possible. We’ve also set the permissions so that, once you get a link, you’re not constantly asked to log in again. There’s a chance that you may need to log in again, but if you’ve transitioned your account via Memberful there’s also a chance you won’t need to. We will update this post when comments are fully deployed so you’ll know if you’re not seeing them.

There’s an edit button!

Edit Button 1

Of the many requested features, the biggest one seems to be an edit button. I’m not sure why. My language is prefect. For the rest of you, just hit the gear and it should give you the option to edit your post.

You Can Decide How You Want Comments Ordered

Screen Shot 2023 03 28 At 12.42.20 Pm

Do you want to see the most discussed article or do you want to see the most favorited? It’s up to you! Use the icons above to decide how you want to see comments. Because this is a friendly place, we’re not doing upvoting and downvoting. Your only choices are to give something a smiley face (favorite) or do nothing. We hope this also discourages trolling and keeps this a fun place to interact.

Notifications. Oh so many notifications.

Replies

Our new commenting system features a nice little comment notification system when you are within a post. The little comment circle floats with you and it gives you a couple of pieces of information. The first number is the number of comments on the post you’re reading, which is fairly straightforward.

The second number, which is orange, can give you even more information. If there’s an awesome conversation you want to keep tabs on without having to keep scrolling through everything, you can subscribe to it. You can also choose to just subscribe to your replies. If you do nothing, it should still alert you to replies when you’re on that post.

All Your Activity In One Place

Screen Shot 2023 03 28 At 12.47.38 Pm

In our current system, it’s hard to tell where your conversations are. Now using the “activity center” you can see all your most recent comments and also all your “subscriptions” (i.e. the conversations you saved). You can always reach this by clicking the little person and gear next to the comment counter on the articles.

We Will Be Adding Features As We Go

The new system includes numerous options we can turn on, including notification via email and user follows. Some of these features we’re going to hopefully roll out in the comings weeks and months, but for the moment we want to make sure the basic system works consistently without issues.

To that end: Please let us know if something isn’t working and please have patience if something breaks. You can email me if you see any issues: matt@theautopian.com.

This is gonna be great!

An Alternative Topshot

There was a lot of debate internally over whether or not the image of Steve Martin from The Jerk was too outdated of a reference. I don’t think it is, both because the film is a classic and because Steve Martin has persevered (he has a popular show on a streaming service right now). Just in case that didn’t land, here’s one inspired by the latest 100 gecs song (which is a total bop) [Editor’s Note: I have no idea what the hell Matt is talking about. I don’t know about “the Jerk” — which is, I assume, a film about the first derivative of acceleration — and I don’t know what a gec is, much less 100 of them. -DT]. 

New Comments Are Here

Photo Credits: 100 Gecs, NBC Universal

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193 thoughts on “The Autopian Is Rolling Out A New Commenting System (With Editing And Notifications) TOMORROW”

  9. I’m hyped for the notifications. It felt like the process of reloading the page and scrolling to my comment somehow amplified the feeling of vanity, and ultimately the disappointment I felt each time I realized I’m not as funny as I think I am.

    2. I gotta disagree, in an age when the best you could get was a 1.44 MB floppy disk, the 500 MB Zip disks were a game-changer. I never had an issue during the 5 minutes I used them around the turn of the millenium.
      CD-RW and thumb drives made them moot, but they had their time in the sun.

      1. Did you not have a CD-R drive? Those were around years before ZIP drives. You couldn’t erase them but you could add data. Best part was you could make your own music CDs and the disks were cheap.

        1. No, those drives were prohibitively expensive in the 90’s. They got even more expensive when you consider that the discs are one-time-use.
          The Zip disks were the best thing going- but only for a short time.

  17. Did the activity center not get rolled out to Firefox? Because I don’t see it. Looks like the prior layout.

    One Kinja feature that seems to have infected here is spellcheck is intermittent. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes something gets flagged, and as I type more the flag disappears. This only happenes in Kinja and now it is happening here.

  20. There’s something I want to say that’s always been very difficult for me to say: “I slit the sheet, the sheet I slit, and on the slitted sheet I sit”. There. I’ve never been relaxed enough around anyone to say that.
    STEVE MARTIN – Navin

  22. Is the reference to the Apple Lisa bonafide? If yes, I’m stupefied. Generally these remarkable devices are in computer museums. It was a biggun’ at the time weighing 48 pounds.

    Actually, the Lisa’s 40th birthday on January 19 of this year received quite a bit of media attention. (Named for Steven Job’s first daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs, a fact which POS father Jobs initially denied until confronted by U2 founder Bono at his villa in the south of France about five years before his death.) Apple spent an astonishing $50 million developing this very advanced platform at that time with a CPU utilizing a Motorola 68000 chipset. One of the first with a GUI interface of course and an operating system with protected memory and a document-oriented workflow. It was also one of the first platforms used for desktop publishing and was a harbinger of the future death of the small independent printer.

    In 1983 it sold for an astronomical $9995! Equivalent to about $27,000 today. It was targeted to business users naturally as this was way beyond the means of typical hobbyists. It was considered a commercial failure as they only sold about 10,000 units. But simple math says they grossed $100 million so they doubled their investment at least. Three thousand unsold units were buried in a landfill in Utah.

    It would not surprise me in the slightest that DT and JT somehow discovered this hidden fact, drove non-stop to Utah, and dug one up under the cover of darkness for use in their fledging undercapitalized business enterprise.

  24. Okay, why does everyone’s profile pic have “Member” on it and why is all text grey? I’m having unpleasant flashbacks to “the old site,” though editing and notifications are still cool and I love the extra nuance potential of italics and boldness and the confusing to read woefully underutilized strikethrough.

    1. Pssst – you had those options (bold, italics, etc) already; the old system understood some HTML tags. 🙂

      Also my pic is the avatar I had before. I can’t tell what yours is, but it looks like a pink donut with sprinkles and a gingerbread person (?).

      1. I guess the “member” and grey text thing is gone now, I don’t know what that was. My pic is a cartoon pony over a background of a donut, I guess it’s kind of hard to tell what it is when the image is really small.

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