Proposal: One comment system everywhere

What changes

Agpedia has comments in several places: the forum, discussions about articles and policies, positions on proposals and replies to them, and soon blog posts, comments under articles and the Talk tab on profiles. They all become one comment system, with the same rules, the same look and the same features everywhere.

The rules

• Every thread has a title, written by the person who starts it. A thread is a conversation about one topic.
• Replies go one level deep. You can reply to a comment, and the reply is shown indented under it. You cannot reply to a reply: replying again adds to the same list under the first comment, and can mention the person you answer with @username.
• No votes. Comments are not voted up or down, and nothing is sorted by popularity. Threads are listed by latest activity; comments and replies are shown in the order they were written.
• Every thread and every comment has a permanent link that always works, including from search engines and from other sites.
• More comments load as you scroll. A long thread shows its first comments, and the next ones appear by themselves when you reach the bottom. Nobody has to click "show more" to keep reading.

The same everywhere

Editing your own comment with its history, moderation, @mentions, notifications and following work the same way in all of them.

Commons ↗

Why

Today each place behaves a little differently, and replies to positions live in hidden forum threads whose titles are quotes. One system is easier to use, easier to explain, and much less code to keep working.

Replies one level deep keep conversations readable: deep nesting gets hard to follow, especially on a phone. Without votes, comments are read in order, as a conversation, and nobody is pushed down for disagreeing.

How it works

• For search engines and links: each thread is a normal page at a fixed address, built on the server. It shows the first 50 comments and has plain links to the next pages, which search engines follow. A link to a comment further down opens the right part of the thread and scrolls to it.
• For readers: in the browser, reaching the bottom of a thread loads the next comments in place, and the address bar follows along, so copying it gives a link to where you are. Without JavaScript, the page links still work.
• Existing comments are kept. Forum comments stay as comments. Replies to positions, which today sit in hidden threads, become replies under their position. Old links keep working.

What this replaces

This replaces the parts of Comments under articles about votes, sorting by best, and replies several levels deep. The rest of that proposal, comments shown under the article, stays.

Technical notes

Forum comments get an optional parent comment, limited to one level by a database check. Positions keep their own record (stance and the version they were given on), and are shown and replied to as top-level comments. The hidden attached threads used for position replies go away; a migration moves those replies under their positions as one-level replies. Thread pages are paged at 50 comments, with ?page= links, rel="next" and rel="prev", and a canonical link per page; a small script fetches the next page as you scroll and updates the address with history.replaceState.