Over the next few weeks we are going to be trialling some changes to the comment system underneath some articles in a couple of sections on the site - Books and Music. The new feature adds to your ability to reply directly to a fellow poster, by introducing indented replies, known as "threading", into comments.
Rather than having to visit your profile to see responses to your comments, replies will be gathered together and displayed underneath a comment. We have not opted for fully threaded conversations, in the manner of an old-style forum or message board, but we will be showing one level of indentation. We hope it will make it easier for you to follow conversation.
Why have we chosen Books and Music? Well, firstly we know we already have some excellent community interaction in those sections on content like Readers Recommend, Poster poems and the regular Tips, links and suggestions thread. Secondly, we have community co-ordinators in place there, in the shape of Hannah Freeman and Adam Boult, who will be able to help us assess the outcome of the trial. They are looking forward to working with the new feature in those sections.
Some of the articles where you can try the new style comments include:
- Girls Aloud to reunite for 2013 tour
- Latitude 2012 lineup: Elbow, Paul Weller and Bon Iver to headline
- Books blog: Tips, links and suggestions
- Poem of the week: Sonnet XXXI by Sir Philip Sidney
We'll be measuring the impact it has on the volume of comments and user engagement, and the levels of moderation required, and we would very much welcome your feedback on the changes. Threaded comments have been a much asked for feature, but we know they are also divisive, with some people really disliking them. You are welcome to leave comments below, where we are also trying the new format, or to send feedback directly to userhelp@guardian.co.uk. We've also gathered together some of the feedback we've already received into this FAQ.
Finally, just a reminder. When you signed up to leave comments on the Guardian website, you agreed to abide by our community standards. It doesn't matter whether comments are threaded or not, everybody has a better experience on the Guardian website if we can all stick to that promise.
Update: Thanks for all your feedback, we have now released an update to threading fixing many of the bugs that have been reported in the comments.
- Highlighting text then using the formatting buttons now works in
Internet Explorer - We have introduced tooltips to the formatting buttons to give you extra information
- Formatting buttons now appear in the comment preview dialog for top-level comments
- We have corrected the pluralisation for 'View 1 more response'
- We have fixed the appearance of threaded responses in Internet Explorer 7
Update 2: We are trying out a new presentation which hides threaded responses by default, with a toggle switch to reveal them. Please let us know what you think of this version in the comments.
