⭐Update Our Upcoming "Comments" Feature & Other Minor Design Tweaks

[Zwielicht]

@Impulse and I have been looking into ways of modernising Office Outlaw. As it is right now, the layout is largely just still default Xenforo, so we'll be making some adjustments to the appearance of elements that look have that default barebones look, such as the breadcrumbs menu.

In addition to some upcoming minor design adjustments, we'll be introducing this Comments feature on a trial basis across the forum.

Here's a screenshot showing roughly what it'll look like. We're still working on the CSS issues with it, but you get the idea.

With this update, we're hoping to solve the following issues that often plague the antiquated nature of Xenforo forums:

1. It organises the conversation flow of threads in a more modern fashion. In other words, it should appeal to others who are familiar with this kind of structure on sites like YouTube, Reddit, and Imgur.
2. Reviews for sales listings on our platform can be easily seen at the top of a listing since members will be able to reply directly to the opening post.
3. In a thread where personal dialogue occurs between a few members, this type of organization will make easier for the thread to not feel like it's been derailed. Users can have a conversation with each other freely and other users can reply to the thread as normal without feeling like they're just interrupting a conversation.

Once we work out the bugs and design issues with this new feature, we're going to be testing this out for about a week to see how everyone here feels about this. We'll leave the comment feature on beside the usual "Reply" and "quote" buttons during this trial period in order to give members a choice to use it, but if we implement this on a permanent basis, we would consider removing those buttons in favour of this style.

Initially, comment depth will be limited to 1, meaning you can only comment on posts and not other comments. We can increase this later on, of course. We're still working on a way for members to be able to hide comments, so this should be ideally ready to go once we enable it for members, but no promises on that one.

In the event that it's just not for this community or there are too many issues with it, we've already run tests of our own and it would extremely easy to revert this with no issues and convert the comments back into posts.

Should this be implemented on a permanent basis, we will fix the padding issues and see what else we can do it to make it cleaner. There are a few other adjustments we'd need to make to this as well. The main thing is, we just want to see how this works for this forum.

 

[shattered world]

This would be a good update to the forum.

I don't know why Xenforo doesn't just have this kinda shit in by default cause it would really make things look cleaner but oh well.

 

[Zwielicht]

It's something that's not for every community and some people just prefer the old way that's used by default.

 

[Zwielicht]

Also, you can see a preview of it under your post here.

 

[Champagne]

This is a cool addition that I haven’t seen on other forums. I’ve already seen some of the testing features, and it could really give the forum a cleaner look and improve interactions between users. I’m glad this is being implemented.

 

[t2van]

So how does this work? I thought it was for profile comments? But its for threads if the above example is correct?

So if you hit reply it becomes a comment rather than a post?

 

[Impulse]

So how does this work? I thought it was for profile comments? But its for threads if the above example is correct?

So if you hit reply it becomes a comment rather than a post?

Yes, it's meant for threads.

During the trial, the option to comment under a post will be next to the 'quote' and 'reply' buttons. There is also the option where we may choose to remove both of those buttons so that they are replaced by the new comment feature (because having two different functions called 'reply' and 'comment' might be confusing), but we'll decide that after the trial based on community feedback.

 

[Web4point0]

Looks interesting for sure. Personally I don't think there should be a reply button and a quote button and a comment button like in the image. That would just look confusing to anyone using the forum.

Can this just replace the reply button?

 

[Zwielicht]

Yes, it can just replace the reply button, but we won't make a decision on that until after the trial period.

We'll leave the comment feature on beside the usual "Reply" and "quote" buttons during this trial period in order to give members a choice to use it, but if we implement this on a permanent basis, we would consider removing those buttons in favour of this style.

P.S. The way this is displayed is actively being worked on, for anyone reading this.

 

[SilverClouds]

Yes, it can just replace the reply button, but we won't make a decision on that until after the trial period.

P.S. The way this is displayed is actively being worked on, for anyone reading this.

Sooo it's like on Reddit now?

 

[Zwielicht]

Yes, it would be like the way comments flow on Reddit, YouTube, or Imgur.

There are a surprising number of sites that have this exact feature these days.