Also.... Why was the date order changed? Wowhead used to use the American standard of MM/DD/YYY. It was like this from the beginning. I understand that the site is used by more than just American users, but the game's publisher and developers are American and the site is maintained in English as an enforced rule... and unless I'm mistaken, Zam is based in the US as well.I'm liking this update less and less every minute. The comments are a core resource of this site, and the system has been turned over and dropped on its head.Edit: When was this test for the new comment system initiated, and why was it not more widely advertised? The forums may see a fair amount of traffic, but it is nothing compared to the actual database. I'm willing to bet that at least half of your users had no clue that was coming. There wasn't a top-of-page notification, there was no notice on the Wowhead News site, no one-liner below the search field on the front page, and it was not a part of the list directly below the one-liner.This is a change to a fundamental system on the site, and the only notice posted was on one of the least-used resources on the site.
The date format was changed from MM/DD/YYYY to YYYY/MM/DD over a year ago because there aren't only americans.While I'm at it, the cap of 250 comments in the user page has also always been that way and is not a new change (it's that way for performance reasons).Not being able to delete your own comment has also been that way for several months, although I changed it today as it was never intended to be that way.
Can we get back our ability to detach comment replies?
So far from what I have seen, I like.My first concern was that people will be tempted to down vote every post above theirs, won't they?
If they try it, the new system will kick in and slap them on the wrists for it.
I like StackExchange commenting system very much.
The key advantage of sort by date is it made it easy to find comments that apply to the latest patch. This is especially relevant in times like now, where comments specific to patch 4.3 may be very important, but not yet have had much time to acquire any votes.I suppose the user base can fix this over time by heavily downvoting all comments that have since been obsoleted due to a patch. But this doesn't feel very good -- I don't want to have to downvote a comment that very insightful in its day, and I also don't want to lose the historical record of how an ability has changed over time.The other advantage of sort by date is that it preserves the time order between top level comments. People do use new comments to reply to the comments above them. Sometimes these are very important clarifications or rebuttals. Often though they do not embed the comment they are fixing, since at the time the reply was made the original post was guaranteed to be just above you.In short, I fear this will destruct a lot of value in the existing comment collection.
This is pretty unusual, I guess we can get used to it. What I'm worried about is old comments and replies - if someone replied to a comment, and the reply has received a large rating, it will still be at the bottom of the page if the original comment had low score? I guess this works well with the new paradigm that replies should be directly connected to the comment, but there are tons and tons of good existing replies that do not follow this rule. What happens to them?