The numbering system is much more democratic and allows you to ‘@’ someone as well as bring in a separate, nuanced point of view. If the moderation feature can be changed to not screw up the post numbering, I think you’re set

I tend to get to the comments late in the day or even (*gasp*) a day after the article was posted – I read via my somewhat-intelligent phone and GReader, but if there’s something I want to comment on I try to visit it later.

When I get to a post with 100+ comments I tend to skim down the page looking for JD’s replies, or the dotted red box that highlights a particularly good comment (perhaps you need to do that more often as several posters aren’t aware of the convention).

I love the idea of more follow up esp since I often miss the comments entirely.

I learned a valuable lesson about “stuff” 15 years ago, when I had to move away from my husband, dog, and stuff for one year to do an internship (hubby was still in grad school so he had to stay put). I missed my husband and dog terribly, but the stuff? Not at all! I rented a studio apartment that I furnished with a bed and a computer (and a few dishes and clothes) and found it to be a very peaceful haven. Lessons learned: people matter, long-distance marriages are no fun, stuff is just clutter.

For this blog, I like un-nested comments because it does force people to remain on-topic.

Another idea, if the GRS technical elves can do this… I’d love to see a “JDR/editor picks” of comments. The NYT website does this… they highlight the most interesting comments on a given article. It would be a great timesaver for those of us who come late to the post with 453 comments.

As far as the comments, I like the way they are now (other than the refresh issue). I don’t think that you need comment promotion. That mostly helps push the “First!!111!!!! [irrelevant comment]” down, and I don’t think GRS has a problem with that. Discussions here are generally good and on topic, so I’m happy to just read through the whole thing.

I’m 60/40 on the idea of threaded comments – 60% yes.

I’d really, really love to simply be able to “like” or promote another person’s comment. I like to see when there is a big response to a post, which may be lost with this, but it is tedious when there are a lot of “me-too” types that don’t necessarily add to the conversation.

The slow caching thing is annoying too, but not as bad. You could probably mitigate it a lot by simply changing a “get a new version after 5 minutes” setting somewhere to “get a new version after for 1 minute”. I’ve deduced that you’ve got exactly three servers for the site, and that the slave ones don’t update from the master very often. You can tell this by waiting for someone to post a comment and then refreshing the page repeatedly and watching the number of comments alternate back and forth, with about a 2/3 chance of giving you the older number. Eventually the slave servers catch up, but it’s frustrating in the middle of a fast-moving conversation.

While we’re talking about site issues, make the comment box bigger. It’s not a huge deal here at the bottom of posts, because safari lets me resize it, but in the “edit comment” screen it’s tiny and you can barely make it bigger.

I do like the follow-up/elaboration-on-an-idea posts.

One of the charms of GRS is the flat style of comments. Yes sometimes it is hard to follow who responded to whom, as references to a previous post may be a much lower number or name and I need to scroll back if I want to see what they are talking about.

But flat style comments are a equalizing and democratizing force. For example, if you want make a response or comment to a previous poster AND you want to add your own comment to the primary article, what to do? Two posts.. one in threaded responses and one at the highest level? That seems too much to do to participate.

Also, threaded comments can be easy or hard. Do I need to click open each and every sub-comment to read the entire discussion? If I need to click (and maybe even wait to refresh) each one to read everything, I will not spend the time to read any. Right now I can just scroll and scan everything, stopping to read in depth anything if I so desire. If I need to click too much, etc., I won’t bother.

Keep it the way it is in my view.

I do agree that the original author should be encouraged to participate and respond to comments. It shouldn’t be a law, or even a requirement that every comment needs the author’s response, but that the author should understand that their responses is important, and add to the attractiveness of GRS. It isn’t a newspaper, it is an interactive blog. Makes it a better place.

I agree with the Gen X topic in your round-up — most people who are actively trading and trying to time the market are actually hurting themselves. I just wrote a post on what the Japan disaster — and the market flurry accompanying it — can teach us.

I think nested comments (especially more than 1 level deep) encourages off-topic discussion.

I think that with non-nested comments people try harder to stay on-topic since they know that their words need to make sense in the greater context.

One site who I think does nested comments correctly is Consumerist. Only the top-level comment is show by default with a “X comments” button. People can go off-topic (and they do) but it doesn’t take away from the blog post related conversation as much.

And I agree with Nancy about non-threaded comments.

Since you get so much traffic, maybe it’s time for a server upgrade

Eh, I don’t want to pry into the economics of your business– but a server upgrade (or different, faster platform?) seems like the next logical step.

If you feel like consulting a very sharp hive mind, check out the Ars Technica forum.

From what I understand, GRS generates enough traffic that the server gets cranky. This is especially true when someplace big links in. When that happens, we need to have a safety net. So, we use Supercache, which doesn’t necessarily show the most recent version of the page. (If I remember right, Supercache checks to see how recently you viewed the site. If it’s in the past few minutes, it shows you what you saw before. Or something like that.)

But I agree: This is frustrating for regular users. Does it make sense to frustrate regular readers 95% of the time just so irregular readers never experience frustration? I don’t know.

The best solution would be to find a way so that regular users always saw fresh content, but new users saw cached pages. But this is way beyond my know-how. Maybe the GRS technical elves can find a solution.

Not sure on the nested comments…

This morning successive refreshes jumped me between a page where the last post was a broken one I wrote (and needed editing), and another page where my post was corrected and there were many more posts folowing up. Even after clearing browser cache, it kept going back and forth. Very strange! LIke being trapped in time. Twilight zone……

So yes, this is to add to #9 (or #? Samantha).

For this reason alone I think nested conversations should be at least postponed. Fix what’s broken first (faulty refreshes), then consider new bells and whistles.

And I would love to see nested comments.