Comment Pages in S2: the old becomes new

[fu]

One of our long-running projects is to remove the old crufty code written in BML (our old templating system) and replace it with better alternatives throughout the site. And the coding for talkread.bml -- which is what is used any time you load up a site-skinned comment page -- is a particularly painful example.

Add to that, having the site-skinned comment pages be written one way, and custom comment pages another, makes it likely for one to lag behind the other. For example: site-skinned comment pages show the link for entries with screened comments as: "x visible | y screened". But S2 comment pages didn't have that information until this code push!

So I'm really happy to say that we have a new version of the comments page which uses pure S2, so now site-skinned comment pages and journal-styled comment pages are formed the same way on the backend even if they don't look the same. exor674 worked hard on the backend to make this possible, then momijizukamori came through with some spit and polish (with some help from kunzite).

The idea is for the new version to look as much as possible like the old version, though there might be a few discrepancies, because the backend is so different. momijizukamori has done her best to mimic the look and feel of the old comment pages. But the comments page is one of the most used pages here, so we'd like you all to come and give it a good shakedown.

Turn on beta testing for the "New S2 Comment Pages" -- and let us know in comments if you find anything out of the ordinary.

List of known issues.

Comments

[murkrows]

Hi! I know this is pretty late, but here goes. I'm on a Mac right now, and after updating to the latest OS (OSX 10.8.3) I've noticed that Dreamwidth's S2 commenting is taking a lot longer to load, and frequently crashes with an error message. Sometimes on a comment page, the comments simply don't load at all, and I have to refresh the whole page if I want to see anything more than the origin journal entry. On 10.6, I never had this problem at all, even with the S2 commenting. Dreamwidth works fine on Lynx, though, which is what I'm using now. If possible, would someone at DW please look into this? Thank you guys, I really appreciate everything you've done. <3

EDIT: Ah, sorry, spoke too soon. Looks like it still happens on Lynx. :c So maybe it's something else? I'm not sure...

[fu]

Hmm, what error message are you getting? Open a support request with the details so we can investigate further!

(and yeah, i fit's happening on a text based browser sort of sounds like an issue with connecting to DW maybe..? Or something not this-beta related)