I have to agree on this change being for the worse in several places. While the ability to click and un-vote is good (I like being able to fix problems; I *have* accidentally misclicked downs when I meant to vote up), the inability to delete comments is a huge issue. As is the ability for comments to be their own 'subset'. I have several times gone through and seen where a comment made was the answer to a question. A comment which was 'greened' where the question had been downvoted into obscurity. Some of the funny threads are all done in comments, with the original statement having been downvoted for whatever reason. Is there a way to take those very important comments and make them comments in their own right? Or does the person who made them have to go unrecognized for a valuable offering to the community?In addition, I am also in agreement with the need to be able to order it by when comments were made, rather than 'by value'. I always ordered this in the same way. It makes moderating very easy: older comments were made earlier, and often are the ones whose information needs to be tended to. Things I *do* like: the 'deleted' being right at the bottom. It not only makes it easy to keep away from the 'purged and deleted everywhere' (which, yes, is annoying to me), but it lets it be easily policed if something's been deleted that shouldn't have been. Just go, basically, to the bottom and check what got deleted. As mentioned above, the ability to 'undo' your votes and the larger arrows. I have misclicked, and while I wouldn't call it a major problem, the inability for me to *undo* that misclick has been. Especially now that a downrate actively gives someone a penalty. I hope that removing that 'downrate' will remove the penalty as well. I wouldn't want to see people downvoting, then changing it, just to mess with people.
I feel like I'm losing something when a high rated comment that I had posted under the old system just happened to be a reply to another comment.Is there no way anymore to detach the comment as a reply, so that it can be upvoted and downvoted like normal? I know that this could be done under the old comment system.I could just repost my comment, but then I'd lose all the upvotes that it already had.EDIT: Also, I can't see the "replies" (as opposed to comments) that I posted on my profile? I'd like to be able to curate any comment I've made and make corrections to it over time. I can't do so under the new system.
There is too much feedback to answer to everyone individually so I'll do a sort of Q&A.Q: You can't downvote repliesThis seems to be a very popular concern, and we are open to add a downvote functionality. Leave feedback about that in this thread.Q: Comments are no longer green!This is another common concern, and again something that we're open to revisit. Please vote in this poll with your preference; if more people prefer green comments we will reimplement it.Q: It's so differentIf you are not concerned about a particular new or missing feature but you dislike how different it is overall, please give it a couple of days and if you still don't like it feel free to post.The invite to leave a reply when you downvote is annoyingThis will be removed soon. It's just a temporary reminder for all users that it's nice to explain why you downvoted a comment.Why wasn't there a preview of this change?There was. Before it got locked it was a "Global Announcement" meaning it was visible in every forum.My reputation page links to blank pagesThis is a temporary bug for old entries, it will not happen anymore. It's because we chose not to take away reputation earned before the comment => reply conversion, so there are entries for comments that no longer exist because they are now replies.
Horrible. That's the only way I can describe the changes.The good:Comments ranked by vote count rather than date with deleted/purged at the end of the list.You can change your voteThe bad:EVERYTHING ELSE.LostDrewid said it best so far:
Were recent comments lost in the conversion? I all of a sudden have no comments listed in my profile more recent than July 29.
FIX: You should now no longer see broken links in your reputation history.
Being a developer myself, I know how incredibly frustrating it is when your hard work gets lambasted by the user base.However, I find myself having to agree with our more verbose commenters that everybody else are quoting - essentially making replies useless as far as readability goes is a significant turn for the worse.Having the reply, the username and the date on one line with no distinction between the two (such as a quote block or some other visual element) was - IMO - a horrible UI decision. No, I don't care what UIs popular websites frequented by people who still use mailing lists to exchange information uses. I liked WoWHead when it looked modern.In addition, I'd like to make an assumption: I'm assuming that downvotes counteract upvotes as far as reputation is concerned.If this assumption is incorrect, please disregard the rest of this post.Allow me to present a scenario to you:Let's say in Patch 5.0.0 a quest works in a specific way. Someone posts a helpful guide for it, and it gets tons of upvotes.Now let's say in Patch 5.3.0 Blizzard changes the quest, and thus the guide becomes useless. What happened previously was, someone posted a reply with an updated guide, and readers would upvote the new reply until both of them were pretty prominent.What will happen now is, the person who posted the OP will receive a lot of downvotes until his guide gets downvoted into the red zone, and then the new guide will be on top.Great, the information for the readers is now quicker to find, right? Yeah, sure, but the person who posted the original guide get dozens of downvotes for no reason. Is it his or her fault that Blizzard changed the mechanics of a quest? Does that person deserve negative rep?My answer to both of those questions is: No.It would seem that whoever green-lighted this change does not agree with me, which I find saddening.
Before detailed reply to each change and reasoning - when I came home today and by jumping on my last rep change in comments I noticed that... everything awkardly changed. The good minimalistic and compact comments has turned into huge forum/FB-like steamships, moreover, those steamships had huge meaningless arrows and confusing white numbers to left, spam-like replies to them. Now it's only missing ability to put insane-size avatar faces to left, all the info about user who posted comment, and ofcoarse - a "poem of huge siganture texts".All the changes that been added within one night has made me really annoyed and angry. A lot of stuff I loved in Wowhead(and becose of which I choosen this site) has gone away...Well, let's talk about those things individually:
BTW: I went to a couple of items to see how the new comments looked.The default sorting is horrible.What, that 23 rated 2.0.1 comment is really the best one about this item?So, I sorted by date and got it back the way it was.REQUEST: Can we have a sort by date in reverse implemented, such that the most recent comment is displayed first?Cheers.
Wow a is a fluid game. Things are constantly changing, and thus, this comment system is flawed at it's basic level. A comment that gets upvoted to the top might tomorrow become irrelevant, or worse, completely terrible advice. The old system provided a nice workaround for this by putting comments in chronological order. It wasn't ideal sure, but it was better than this.I'll also echo other peoples' concerns, and add this: the only improvement here is that you can see if you've previously up or downvoted a comment.edit: oh, and a minor comment, the line that says when a comment was last edited kind of makes everything look a bit messy to me, it could go at the top (after the original date and patch of the comment).
I think the new change is sort of ugly, but maybe I'll get used to it. I bet the hardest part of the change will be replies that were incorrectly left as comments (happens often) now being sorted differently from their original order. I also miss seeing our icons when we post. :( Lastly, I thought sorting by date was the most relevant way to sort comments. I'll give it a shot though and see how it goes.
I mentioned this in the preview thread, and I mentioned it earlier before there was a thread about this new commenting system, and I'll mention it again, since there was no reply as to whether such a thing will be considered...I would like to have the ability to permanently delete my own comments.As I said before, it could be restricted by reputation, and it could also be restricted so that you can't delete comments which have more than X rating.The reason why I'm asking for this, is simple. I am one of those people who mistakenly used delete - instead of edit - on my own comments as I thought they'd be gone completely. Now they're there, in the comment section, right next to a comment that I made afterwards, and I can't remove the older version. I've done this on quite a few comments where I changed very little, so now it looks like I've posted two similar comments.I also saw a few of these mistakes made by other people. On one item there were like 10 deleted (by the poster) comments, and then the 11th was the last, correct version.I personally don't see why posters don't have the ability and right to remove their own postings. I hate forums which don't allow this, and here in the comments it feels even worse, in my opinion.Are there any plans for allowing commenters to permanently delete their own comments, or should I just start going through the several dozen or so items where I made this mistake, reporting them all to a moderator, hoping there'll be no backlash from making such a stupid mistake in the first place?Also, I would like to point out that while not a significant issue, when someone sees two or more similar comments posted by the same person, it can have a negative effect on them, in that while the comment (which is there, not the deleted one) deserves an upvote, rather than upvote, or rather than not do anything, someone might to downvote the actual comment because of the clutter.Anyways... Hopefully whoever's in charge could look at this suggestion / issue and get back to me and everyone else who's wondering about this ability.
Well, at the very least, I'm glad there's steps being taken to resolve the issue where people will downrate every single comment in a page, on every page, just to gain reputation.However, it will probably still be done for the achievements that involve rating X number of comments (the Critic series, I think?). So aside from just straight removing those, it will probably still happen.As someone who doesn't really use the Wowhead forums, gotta say I didn't see it coming! Looks like some others have also mentioned that. I was wondering why I got awarded with privileges I already had. I was going to pass it off as a glitch until I meandered over to News.Glancing over my own comments, looks like this hasn't been too harmful on my end. In fact, now my Wrath of Tarecgosa comment is the tippy top! (Sticky pls lolol)I'd require a lot more exposure to the new system before I really have any valid opinions of it, though. Well, maybe one: The replies don't make themselves out to be very obvious; sometimes I don't notice that they are there. I probably just need to get used to moving my eyes to different places than usual.
You can now see a list of your replies on your user page: http://www.wowhead.com/user=Koper#repliesReplies can also be linked to directly now.
Removing the patch number from replies was a really bad idea.
You can now always delete instantly your own comments. If the comments are deleted by the OP, rather than by the vote process, the comment will be visible only to the OP and moderators -- high reputation users will not be able to see it.You can now also instantly undelete your own comments if you deleted them yourself. If deleted by a moderator, or by the vote process, you can still vote to undelete.