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

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!

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

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.

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

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]. 

Photo Credits: 100 Gecs, NBC Universal