Detroit News Labs

Threaded comments in blogs, forums, and articles

Over the past couple of weeks we have been refining the threading in our forums, so that we can tie comments to articles, blog posts, and other comments.

Today, we placed the final piece of new functionality for threading into the forums. There are now links after each comment that let you reply to the comment, read others comments in that thread, read other comments by that user, or report a post as being offensive.

So, while the forums still work the same way they always have, you can also now view forum comments a few different ways:

• If a comment has a link beneath its title that says “See related article", it was submitted in response to an article or a blog post. If you click either the headline or the “Read this thread” link, you’ll be taken to a page that displays all of the posts on that article or blog post.
• If a comment doesn’t have a link to a related article, if you click on its headline or “Read this thread” link, you’ll be taken to a page that just has comments with that headline.
• If you click on either the poster’s name or the “Read posts by user” link, you will be taken to a page that lists out that poster’s comments, most recent first.

You also now can reply to a post by clicking the “Reply to this comment” button, and it will automatically submit your comment so that your post will be in the thread with the post to which you are replying.

Also, now, you can click on links in articles to view that article’s comments, and in our blogs, you can see how many comments each post has gotten.

So, try this all out, and let us know what you think.

Coming soon: The next helpful forum tool we are working on will (finally) allow you to log in once then enter as many comments as you want once you successfully log in. We’re hoping we’ll have more to report on this next week!

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