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February 06, 2004

Change to Comments display

I just made a change to the setup of this blog. The Comments are now displayed in "reverse chronological" order, just like the main blog entries. In other words, the most recent comment will be listed first and then you read down the page to the older comments.

Posted by jghiii at February 6, 2004 12:04 AM
Comments
Posted by: namrehs on February 6, 2004 01:29 AM

Oooh. In a democracy, I would have voted against this.

So often the comments progress and build upon each other. They are often linear (except when that damn berkeley hippie goes off on one of his drug-induced tangents) and it's nice having them displayed in that linear fashion. It seems counter-intuitive to display them in reverse order.

Posted by: nna oJ on February 6, 2004 03:37 AM

!kcaJ ,aedi dooG

Posted by: daoT ssiM on February 6, 2004 03:53 AM

.desrever ti evol lliw namrehs ,sherman erongi ,kcaJ

Posted by: Jo Ann on February 6, 2004 04:45 AM

Jack, I'm with Namrehs. This is going to throw off the linear fashion of the comments that are progressively built upon each other. Which is what Namrehs is saying below... did you read that comment first? If not, this is out of linear fashion order. So, go read that first! Well... go! GO!

It's like when you send someone an email exchange and you say "...but start at the bottom so it makes sense". But you know they never do...

Posted by: MGA on February 6, 2004 07:45 AM

What? You mean if I post first, I don't get to stay first?

I think this is just a sneaky way to squeeze more comments from the viewership.

I demand a full Congressional bi-partisan investigation.

Quick. Somebody find me a lawyer.

Posted by: had on February 6, 2004 12:41 PM

Jack,
Most updates you have made are great, this one sucks. There is no flow to it, try reading a book from the end to begining, it makes no sence. Please fix it, your readers are very unhappy here.

Posted by: Jack Hodgson on February 6, 2004 12:58 PM

I'm hearing that you guys are not wild about this change to the comments. (Actually, you do seem to be fairly 'wild' about it.)

Anyway, one thing I find interesting about this is that you've been reading the blog itself, and the list of 'recent comments', in reverse chronological all along. And you don't seem to be bothered by that.

Posted by: SHERMAN on February 6, 2004 01:34 PM

Hasty generalization there. Just because we put up with the absurd reversal doesn't mean we like it, and it doesn't mean we will continue to do so for long.


It the future, when historians pinpoint the start of the death of Gone East, they will point to this change.


REVERSE THE COMMENT ORDER!
DAMN THE MAN! FREE DICH CHENEY!

Posted by: FkciR on February 6, 2004 02:02 PM

I have to agree with nnA oJ and namrehS, the reversal is confusing.

In particular, I was reading an earlier thread before I got to this one announcing the change. Without looking at the time/date stamp I tried to read through the comments in response to the posting and got totally confused.

Bottom line, your change is designed to favor extremely regular users of your blog (who just want to see the latest post) and makes things extremely uncomfortable for someone who only checks occasionally and has to first read the message top to bottom, and then scroll through all the responses bottom to top. This makes your eyes keep jumping around: first reading a response to the end, then scanning up to the top of the next response, reading that top to bottom, then scanning up to the next, etc. How stressful is that?

It is soooo much easier to just read things top to bottom. It's really easy to see where you left off last and what is new. The eye just flows from one response to the next, happy and carefree.

On top of that, I'd predict that anyone who visits your blog for the first time will totally not get what you're doing and just get totally confused.

So, Jack, please return things back to normal! Right now I feel like I'm driving on the wrong side of the road.

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