As we work on updating Connect, we would love your feedback on the order comments appear. Would you prefer comments to appear in chronological order (as they do now) or in reverse chronological order (most recent first)? A visual representation of what this could look like is below. This would also move the comments box to make it more accessible.
...Chronological is perfect.
Thanks!
I have to add, I wrote my post before my first coffee this morning. Re-reading it now, I'm ashamed to be British.... ;-)
I prefer chronological - newest at the bottom - and stop the replies turning up in the middle of threads as PKH pointed out - makes it too easy to miss a reply or the direction of the conversations
Thank you all for your feedback. It's good to get your input on issues like this one.
Ian, thanks for your suggestion that we consider providing an option that would allow users to toggle the viewing order. That sounds like a brilliant solution to me. I'll pass your suggestion on to the developers.
I've just voted for keeping the ordering chronological too. Eching the above, when you look at how CONNECT posts often work, my gut feeling is the that gains in making this change would be dubious. Top that with the transitional confusion in making that change leads to pushes me to the no vote without hesitation.
There is a good case when you look at some threads for reverse-chronological ordering, and I can certainly see why people would request it (and I've thought a few times that this would be good too when ploughing through posts).
So, it's a sensible request to make, that would help in some instances. Given that, could comment ordering be provided as option on posts? A simple link which toggles from "Comments in date order" "to Comments in reverse date order" depending on what view you have at the time?
I vote for the chronological order and support PKH comment.
A thread has often has multiple replies - that would mean I had to scroll all the way down as the fist thing to do, to read the comments before adding my own comment. I think this is awkward and doesn't improve usability.
Best Regards
Nicolai
I think the present chronological order is fine. Quite often, the last comment in the discussion is not the latest. A comment may have replies and these form a mini-discussion within the main discussion. Also, a user may reply to a comment which is not the last comment. For most discussions, you get
A
B
C
E
H
D
G
F
The indentations in the example above shows the replies to which comment and the letter sequence shows when they are posted. As you can see, it gets quite complicated and reversing the chronological order will not help. In fact, I think it will make it worse. The present order forces the user to read through the previous comments. With the next comment at the top of the discussion, the user will definitely not read what has been posted before and repeating them.
What is important is the indentation and the link to the latest post.
Just a bit of explanation ... we wondered if this change would make things easier for users responding to long threads. Currently, if you want to read or respond to a long thread, like this one, the user needs to use the pager at the bottom of the page, navigate to the last post, and compose their reply.
With the new proposal, the comment form would be immediately under the forum post and new comments would be added to the top of the list (instead of the bottom).
Many discussion forums work this way but we understand that if you've grown accustomed to scrolling to the end of a discussion to comment, this change may be uncomfortable.
Hey--on the right side over there is a poll. It's lost on this particular blog because we've overwhelmed the right side with information. But feel free to cast your vote. ---->