Upgrades to the ToffeeWeb comment system

Hopefully some of you will have noticed a number of improvements that have finally been implemented by Arena, directly in response to your requests and concerns about their Comment System after we had to switch from our previous hard-coded legacy approach.

• Text formatting: A little sub-menu of icons appears when you start writing a comment, the Aa symbol pops open the text formatting submenu that allows you to Bold, Italic, Underline and Strikethrough the text of your comments.
• Add URL Links: Links to webpages can be inserted by highlighting text in the comment, like the name of the website, and clicking on the link symbol, then pasting in the URL and clicking Apply.
• Blockquote: The last item on the new submenu is a pair of quotes used to indent a section of text as a direct quote. This can be text that you copy and paste from another comment, or from some external source you want to emphasise.
• Edit your Comment: If you don’t like something about the comment you submitted, you can now go back and correct it at any time. Or delete it — that’s entirely your choice. Hover over your post and click on the three vertical dots top right.
• Expanded Edit Window: Arena have also fixed a bug that only showed the first 3 lines of your comment when you started editing. It now shows the whole comment.
• View all your Comments: If you click on a commenter’s name, a pop-up appears. If you ignore the zeros and click on View profile, all the (recent) comments made by that person are listed, with links to each thread.

Still to come

Arena have assured us they are still working a number of improvements we have been pushing for:

• Comment ordering: We know that Oldest by default would get us back a lot closer to how things were. We have been advised that this option will be in place by November 6th.
• Comment Numbering: We’re discussing with Arena the possibility of numbering the comments, allowing direct cross-reference to be made to specific older posts.
• Show all Comments: We’ve told Arena how important it is to have all the comments showing in chronological order. This one is proving to be a little more difficult to get agreed as an objective.

Let us know if you still have concerns about where we are going with this. Hopefully more fans have got used to the new comment system and are able to use it more easily. We’re hoping to enhance the site with Polls that Arena facilitates as well, so any suggestions would be welcome.

Also, we’ve added links to the Live Forum and Recent Comments on the main drop-down menu, under SITE.