I noticed that some folks are having a little trouble with comments in some sections of the website.
Some of you probably recall when we started sections like ‘Reader Initiated Alerts’ that the settings only allowed for a certain number of comments before it displayed ‘click for newer comments’—meaning the newest comments were not displaying at the top of the page. In order to alleviate that issue after we reach 500 comments on a given topic I delete older comments–this creates linking issues etc.
This morning I was able to double the number of comments visible before the ‘click for newer comments’ link appears–and I think I can go further, but we will see what happens.
Over time the amount of commenting traffic has grown dramatically. At any given time there are about 35,000 comments on site—which is where I have kept it by deleting old stuff–I have probably deleted 100,000 or more over time.
We will press the envelope some and see if we can maintain all comments without ‘breaking’ something.
Tim, does this platform allow you to offload an archive of (as opposed to deleting) older comments?