LW Update 2018-08-03 – Comment Sorting
Comment Sorting
Comments can now be sorted by “oldest”
Old posts from the time-before-nested comments now default to sorting comments by “oldest.”
You can set your profile preferences for default-comment sorting. Comments will attempt to sort by the following algorithm:
If you’ve manually set the comment ordering, it’ll use that first.
If the page has a default sorting (see previous bullet), it defaults to that
If you’ve set a default sorting preference for yourself, it’ll use that
Otherwise defaults to sorting comments by highest karma first.
Comment Tooltips
Added tooltips back to comment voting (mousing over upvote/downvote clarifies how to strong vote, and mousing over the karma total tells you the number of votes).
We had removed this because the old tooltip component took a long time to render (a problem on posts with hundreds of comments), but it should be fine now.
AlignmentForum
On the comment sorting options, you can now choose “magical sorting (include LW comments)” which lets you see LessWrong comments as well as Alignment Forum ones.
(On AlignmentForum, you can’t vote on LW comments)
Creating a post or comment now properly auto-upvotes by default, as intended.
All AlignmentForum users can move comments from on alignment-posts over to the AlignmentForum version of that post. (That comment can then be upvoted and start accruing alignment karma for it’s author. The commenter can’t post comments of their own unless an admin has made them an AlignmentForum user)
Bug Fixes
Facebook links should now properly show the post title and metadata, as intended. (Accidentally broke this in the last update)
Event pages now list contact info if that’s been included.
Shouldn’t the user choose the order of priority for the sorting criteria?
The issue is that for older posts, the user’s usual choice won’t necessarily make sense – if a post comes from the time before comment nesting, it seemed unlikely that a user’s usual preferences for sorting would be the sorting they want, because the comments will be harder to read on anything other than “sort by oldest.” (this is for posts earlier than around 2009)
Oh, I misread the first priority—I thought the author of a post could choose how readers would see the comments. (Which would be a reasonable opt-out feature.)