We are testing a pretty awesome new comment system that allows you to “thumb up” or “thumb down” comments. Highly rated comments are highlighted in yellow and controversial/hotly debated comments are highlighted in orange. Comments with a high number of “thumb downs” (and without sufficient “thumb ups”) are hidden. My comments and comments by TFB contributors will continue to be highlighted in dark green.

I am also testing comments going live immediately, without having to wait for me to manually approve them. The benefit of this is that it will allow debates to happen much faster, the downside is that spammers and trolls will have their comments approved automatically. I will be relying on y’all to thumb up quality comments and thumb down offensive comments and comments by trollers and spammers so that these comments are hidden and I can go through and delete them.

A screenshot of the new comment system showing a highly rated comments and a hotly debated comment.

Another nifty feature of the comment system is that a live preview of your comment is shown while you type it. This is useful if you are adding links or HTML to the comment.

I will be asking for feedback in one or two weeks time.