Just going to say you guys probably should hold back on feedback for about a day or two, as we're currently coding new changes. Had a meeting with Koper and others today in which I cited a lot of the wonderful posts here and we talked a lot about community reception. It looks like a lot of things will be changing; namely comment replies. Here's an example of what Lilith and I worked together (her designing, me providing feedback). In addition to the UI changes, you will be able to downvote comment replies once again. We are also reattaching replies, then manually I and the content team will go through the 2000+ comments that were over a certain char limit and detach them if they should be separate.,I know some of you will still be unsatisfied (you can't please everyone), but I also think a lot of you will feel it keeps the new design elements a lot of us liked--I personally did like the arrows, I also liked the changes to reputation, and I loved lowly rated comments being put on the last page so I could still peak at them if needed--but keeps comment replies 'similar' to how they were before. I also hope you see that we are listening to you guys and that we always value your input =)
Thanks Schnoodledorfer!
I don't think there's any attempt to redefine words going on here ^_^The new system asked that people used it in a slightly different way. I think your suggestions have merit and you may very well be correctly identifying an important point of friction but I think you're greatly overstating the nature of the change.
I don't think it unnecessarily attaches too much significance to the rating but I think it does draw attention to the rating buttons. The system needs people to vote for comments they found useful and downvote comments they found unhelpful. I've been using the site for years and I know that there have been many times when a comment has given me some excellent info but I've forgotten to rate it. More prominent rating buttons will improve the quality of the ratings which will make the whole database more useful for us all. I understand that it's an aesthetic you dislike but I really hope you give yourself more time to get used to it because there is a practical purpose to it (though, I personally like the aesthetic too).
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
The arrows and ratings would look better on the right side of the posts.It will not interfere with reading and take less of an adjustment.
Biggest problem with the new comment system is I cannot sort by date. Having old posts up top, while they were correct for a long time and as such have received a large number of up votes, may be incorrect since the Cataclysm. Also some world events that get updated (some of the Darkmoon Faire related pages for example). It's just annoying to have to go through and try to find the latest posts, before you could simply go to the last page and they would all be there, now the first page is filled with old information and the last one is filled with downvoted comments and sorting through each page between is just bleh.Also, personally I preferred the old style of arranging replies instead of the new one.
We're converting almost all the old replies that were previously converted into stand-alone comments back into replies. There was also a bug that caused many replies to not be converted, so that's probably why many comments seemed totally out of place.Once this is done (at most half an hour from now), I'm sure you'll see a big improvement.
Back to old layout please.
I came back to follow up on this thread because I use this site so frequently and I have been concerned with the recent changes. I just wanted to say I really appreciate that the devs have stayed in this thread and are providing responses. I am seeing the improvements slowly, and while I may not agree 100% with all of the changes, I admire the Wowhead team for listening to their user base and working with them.On the rating arrow discussion, frankly the choice for size and placement of the arrows does not bother me. I understand the design choice behind wanting to make them visible and encourage visitors to use them. However, I can also understand how some people would find them distracting. They do draw the eye, but perhaps a little bit too well. They can overwhelm the user info line, and to some people it could seem as if the rating of the comment is more important than the person who wrote it. There are two ways to handle that as I see it, either diminish the arrows ever so slightly, or do more to highlight the user info in the comment so that it does not become overlooked. That said, the real importance is the comment itself so I would not want so many UI elements being put into place to distract from the readability of the actual text.Thanks again, and I am looking forward to the new changes that Ashelia and the team have worked on.