So I’ve put a two new tricks on my comment forms.
The first one is that you can now see a preview of what you are going to post. Just write your text and press the preview button and you should see it below. No more orthographical or html errors ;). This was done via the AJAX Comment Preview plugin. It needed me a little css tweaking in order to get it to display as I need it but fortunately I was able to find how to wrap the preview so that it fits with the normal comments.
The second one is the threaded comments option which is done through the plugin with the same name. Although at the moment you can have only one thread per comment, this might make it easier to follow the discussion in case it starts to derail (although I will admit that I don’t have so many commenters). The nifty addition to that is that the author of the comment will now receive an email notification when someone replies to his comment. The bad thing is that you can’t unsubscibe from that but given the low number of comments I get, I do not think that would be a big issue. You can still use the subscribe feature as well, but since this will inform you of every subsequent comment in the thread (even if you do not follow it anymore) most people don’t use it.
This plugin needed me even more time to get right as I needed to format the thread correctly and also test if more than one thread is viable. It is but currently the comment box is screwed on the second comment so I need to work on the css part of it. Until then I’ve enabled only a single thread replies.
One last update is that I expanded the comment field in order to give you a bigger view of what you are writing. I always found the one I had before a bit too small.
I think I’m now going to enable these on my two other blogs as well 😉