Tech Note: New Comment Reporting Features

Thu, May 22, 2008 at 6:13:15 pm PDT

To help us keep track of what’s going on in our comments, tonight we have some new features in our “report” function.

The first thing you’ll notice is that there’s no longer a text link labeled “report” in the top line of each comment. Instead, there’s an icon that’s supposed to be an exclamation point (although some think it looks like Stinky Beaumont’s clue bat) and it’s been moved over to the right of the top line, next to the “Favorites” button.

When you click it, you’ll see one of those cool Web 2.0 “masking” effects (the background will be grayed out), and a dialog box will ask whether you’re “reporting” the comment for offensive or painfully inane moonbat content, or “recommending” it to us—as something we may want to cover on the front page, or for some other non-offended reason. You also have the option to cancel and forget the whole thing.

This new feature uses jQuery and the very compact jQuery BlockUI Plugin to mask out the background and display the custom dialog box.