Editable Comments, Collapsable Threads Now Live

These changes have been pushed live on all sites! Read the SBNation announcement here.

Yes, that's right. You will soon have a chance to fix those spelling/grammar mistakes, take out your swear words, and remove large images. You can clarify what you meant without needing to reply to yourself. You can hide entire threads of conversations that do not interest you.

How will that work? Well, for collapsible threads, a little arrow will appear when you hover over the comment title. Clicking it will collapse the entire thread beneath that post's title. (By the way, now even posts without titles can be clicked to hide their content.)

The staff thought long and hard about how editable comments should be implemented. In commenting systems such as this, you don't want to give the power to edit what you've said for forever, because then reading the replies could get very confusing. No editing hours later to say you knew so-and-so would break out of their slump. Once a comment is posted, an "edit" link will appear, as will a progress bar that is timed to 90 seconds. You have 90 seconds to edit your comment. You can edit it multiple times, but the 90 seconds starts only from the initial post. After that, your comment can no longer be edited.

These much-sought-after features will be coming to all SB Nation blogs later this week. From what we have seen, they work very well! The Powers That Be have said we can now shout this news from the rooftops! So, go ahead and cheer wildly - the Grammar Police will now give you 90 seconds to fix your own typos! ;)

It says a lot that the folks at SB Nation have implemented things that their own users have created. My roll call tool now exists at sbnrollcall.com. A poster at Viva El Birdos had created a Chrome plugin that collapsed comments (that tool, like mine, broke when SBN United went live). They are listening, and they are making changes that the users want.

Now, if only they'd get Shift+Tab working again...