The new community and comment features I said were coming down the pike this morning are now live.
What's new?
Activity pages: There's now a page on the site that displays all recent comments and posts, and there's one on each member's profile page. The sitewide one allows you to catch up on all the comments you might've missed across various posts, and the individual activity streams allow you to find comments and discussions you might've wanted to follow up on. You can also mark comments as favorites if you wanted to, say, mark a bold prediction for bragging rights later.
Tagging members in comments: As threads get deeper, sometimes it's hard to keep track of who's responding to which comment. Now, if you're responding to a specific person, you can tag them with the "@" symbol.
One thing to note: The tag is based on the person's account name, and not the display name. If you want to tag me in a comment, you'd use "@jimmargalus" and not "@jim-margalus." (I see this is also includes tags in posts, which is neat.)
If you're uncertain or unsuccessful with a tag, you can click on the member's name in the comments to see what their @name is. A successful tag will turn into red text linking to the member's profile page as seen above, while an unsuccessful tag will look like plain ol' ordinary text.
Successful tags will result in ...
Notifications: When you're tagged in a comment, you should see a number in the notification bar on the top right of the screen on your desktop. If you're on a phone, you can click on your icon on the top right, and there'll be a number next to the "notifications" link if you have unread ones.
You also have the option of receiving an email whenever tagged. This feature is on by default, so if you'd like to toggle it off, you can do so by clicking on Settings --> Email.
Potential inconveniences
Avatars: For whatever reason, Gravatars show up as broken images, so if you're wondering why your user profile image has resorted to the default pinwheel, that'd be the reason. You can upload a new avatar locally through your profile page. As @billyok noted, the local profile image upload is at the very bottom of the profile page, so scroll pass the Gravatar option.
User accounts: When tagging users in a comment on a mobile device, it'll attempt to fill it in automatically. That's good, except when there are a couple thousand spam accounts that I hadn't cleared out. So, to the trash they went, to the best of my available technology and deduction skills. This shouldn't affect regulars or those who have commented, but if you're a lurker who suddenly wonders why your account doesn't work, it might've gotten caught up in the purge. Especially those who are in Russia and China and use their male supplement or bitcoin work email accounts.
If that's the case, 1) sorry! and 2) re-registering should solve it.
If you encounter any issues, let me know.
