SB Nation Invents Time Travel: Editable Comments Operational

The technical wizards here at Vox Media/SB Nation have just released a new upgrade for all network sites: editable comments. You now have the capability to go back in time, correct those annoying typos, or prevent a social worker from starting a pacifist movement that inadvertently causes the Nazis to win World War Two.

In order to prevent excess corruption of the timeline, there is a limit: 90 seconds. When you post a comment you will then have 90 seconds to edit that comment. You'll see a countdown timer and a progress bar that scrolls from right to left indicating how much time you have left on the edit. Editing the comment does not reset the timer, but you can edit multiple times in the 90 second window.

In addition to comment editing, the new system allows for collapsing comments. Collapsing a top level comment collapses all of its replies, but the collapsed replies will no longer be shown as titles only. They will now be completely hidden beneath the parent comment (which will show as collapsed comments do today). This allows users to hide sub-threads they're not interested in and skip further down the page without scrolling.

Additionally, comments will no longer need titles to be collapsed. Any comment can be collapsed. This cuts down on folks having trouble collapsing large images or GIFs because the poster forgot a title. Users will also have the option to set how they want comments to load by default.

Both of these new functions will work on mobile as well when we go live. In addition to the previously released mobile touch controls for comment navigation, this should dramatically improve mobile device functionality on SB Nation.