Ongoing Improvements to the Comment System

Michael Kenrick

07/11/2026

As many of you will hopefully have noticed, we have finally got Arena to implement a Sort Order option in their Comment System that places the oldest comments first below each article, and with the newest at the bottom.

This is one step closer to how things used to be… but you have to change it manually from Best to Oldest — Best is still annoyingly the default setting, and we’ve been asking them to change this as well.

But, almost inevitably, this has now thrown up a couple of new issues:

Comment Box: Getting the Oldest first sort order reveals another issue: the position of the Comment box — above or below the comments? I think you would prefer it to be below the comments when switching to Oldest sort order.
New comment position: Somewhat bizarrely, and this is going to drive posters mad, when you have Oldest sort order set, and you post a new comment, it appears at the top of the thread — not the bottom! This just defies all logic and renders the sort order setting confusing at best. In fact, it stays at the top, even when you switch through Newest, Best, Oldest… just completely bizarre.

So we’re going back to Arena with these concerns and a few more — some of which we may have already mentioned:

Comment Numbering: I think most people would be happy if we brought this back, but it might be a bit complicated with Arena’s Reply facility in the new Comment System…
Replies: Do we really need this? I guess a fair few are using it so the answer is probably Yes, but a lot of the discussion is hidden frrom first view, and it’s just not like it used to be…
Conversation: This header at the start of the Comments should be something we can redefine. I think we’ve mentioned this before. We want it to say DISCUSSION, not CONVERSATION.
Show More Comments: This button appears after just 6 comments. Arena suggested we could increase to 10, which would be good. However, what we really want is for all comments to show, without this button.
Show all replies: Manually having to open up all reply sub-threads is a severe annoyance. We need another button or setting that opens up all reply threads.
Grammarly: The popular App appears to be supported for checking text in the Comment box; however, misspelt words are not called out with the customary wavy red underline. You have to hover over them for the correction to show.