I’ve been working hard on redesigning the Thripp.com comments system as of late. I don’t have a screen cap of the old one, but it was ugly. All the basic functionality was there, but the colors and dividers and layout and sorting wasn’t up to snuff with the new design. All that changes today. This is my new vision for blog commenting:
This is my gift to everyone on Thripp.com. Do you not see the beauty? 
Let me tell you the features:
• The same wonderful threading interface through a modified version of WP Thread Comment.
• REPLY TO THIS buttons open a JavaScript reply window right below the thread. Use the links to reply to a particular post.
• If the original commenter entered an email address, he’ll be emailed your reply.
• Comments are newest to oldest by thread (yes!), with comments in green and pingbacks in blue. Pingbacks are always listed at the end, because comments are more important, but they’re newest to oldest in their own group too.
• Within a thread (comments that are all replies to above comments with the reply buttons), comments are oldest to newest for continuity. The best of both worlds!
• Multiple levels of nesting; up to 14 deep. Here’s an example. It looks totally cool at the deeper levels, and nothing breaks.
• If the person has no avatar from gravatar.com for his email address, a green box saying “No Avatar” is shown.
• Anonymous comments are allowed, but off by default. You can enable them for you Thripp.com blog under Settings > Discussions, by unchecking the boxes requiring the email and name. I do that on my blogs.
• My posts appear in bold red because I’m the founder of Thripp.com and I’m special. 
Everyone else is green.
• If you enter a website, your Gravatar is a link too! More people will click, because clicking it takes them right to your site, just like clicking your name.
• The date and time is a permalink to the comment. It’s just the same page with the in-page link, but is useful for sharing the comment with others.
• Beautiful colors and margins! I’ve spent hours tinkering with this and measuring everything down to the pixel. And yes, the layout is fluid and works in Internet Explorer 6.
• Front-end management is now fully implemented. This is the coolest thing for me. See those buttons saying EDIT and DELETE for each comment and pingback? They really work! They only appear when you’re logged in and at your blog. The delete button has a pop-up confirmation to be safe.
• Those boxes with the numbers puzzle some people. What they do is to let you thread a comment to a parent comment after the fact. The comment ID is shown in the box. In the above image, if I wanted to thread my ” 
” comment to the testing comment rather than the explanation comment, I’d just enter “264″ in the box and hit Enter on the keyboard and it would be done.
• Pingbacks have a nice custom image saying “Thripp.com Pingback.” I like the colors on them too; they’re complementary to the greens.
• Threaded comments are in white while the originals (highest parent comments) are in green, so they catch your eye while scrolling.
And that’s a wrap. This applies to all old comments too, in case you’re wondering. I couldn’t get pagination in this release, but you can have hundreds of comments on one page with no problems. Here’s a post with 142, for example.
Enjoy the beautiful comments! I know I will. I’d be doing this work if I had just my blog but it’s great to be doing it in a way that benefits hundreds of people at once.
