Making More of the Wilderness: The Comment Section

In our continuing effort to help you make the most of your experience here at Hockey Wilderness, and across SBNation, today we discuss the comment section. While it seems pretty straight forward, SBNation has, yet again, given you so many features and options that sometimes they get lost.

This is not your daddy's comment section. It auto updates, it allows you to recommend a comment to others, to flag a comment for the editors to follow up on, to post your comment to your Facebook account... the list goes on and on. 

We hope you will read through this and avail yourselves of the fun that can be had when interacting with your fellow Wilderness readers. If there are any questions, feel free to email us. We look forward to seeing some comments turn green in the near future.

Make the jump for how to Make More of the Wilderness.

Commenting

The basic layout of Hockey Wilderness is pretty simple: three colums, with links to various items on the left and and right sides and the primary site content down the middle. In the middle will be news items, Game Threads, game recaps, and other fun stuff like, well, this post.

One thing you may find in an article on the front page is a link that says "Continue reading this post" at the end. Be sure to click that to get to the remainder of the post (as you did with this one). If that link is not there, just click the "Comments" link to start reading the comments.

Navigating Comments

Right before the actual comments, you'll see this:

Display lets you change the view of the comments from Expanded (subjects and text) to Collapsed (just subjects are visible).

Checking the Auto-refresh box will toggle on and off the auto-refresh feature in the comments section. When checked on, new comments added to the thread will magically appear with a little note popping up in the corner with the name of the poster who made the latest comment.

Below those two boxes you'll see keyboard commands for navigating a thread. They work as follows:

Reading Comments

When you get into the comments section, you'll see:

The subject line - the bolded area is the subject line. Clicking the subject will collapse the text below it down; click a second time to bring the text back.

Username/avatar - you can click the commenter's username or their avatar on the far right of the screen and it will take you to that person's SB*Nation profile page.

Date/time - after the username is the date/time of the comment. This is also where you will find a link for that specific comment. If you want to refer to a comment in another place, copy the link from the date of the comment and use that URL for your reference.

up - the up link only appears for comments that are a reply to another comment. Clicking up will take you to the "parent" comment to which the current comment is a reply. This is particularly useful in a long thread with many replies to a single comment.

reply - use this link to reply to that comment. Your response will be indented one level and put below the comment you reply to in order based on when responses happened.

actions - this is a special link that allows you to recommend or flag a post. When you click actions, two more links should become visible, labeled Flag and Rec:

The Flag link should be used if you find something offensive or if the commenter is being a troll or posting spam. I hope it won't be necessary to use this button too much. If you Flag a comment, nothing will be visible to you or others, but I will see it in red.

The Rec link allows you to recognize a post that you find particularly informative, useful or that you think others would like to see. At the end of the commenter's line, you'll see a rec count (e.g. 2 Recs). If a comment gets three recommendations, it will turn green and get a big asterisk (not steroid-induced) in front of it.

Posting Comments

When it comes time for you to finally say something within a thread, you can do so via the comment box. This box is the bottom of every thread, or if you'd like to respond to a specific comment, it will magically appear when you click the reply link. As noted above, it would really help if you'd click the "reply" link if you are replying to a specific comment; this will help organize the comments in each post by thread and show each "conversation" as it develops.

Posting Images, Videos And Links In Threads

If you want to post a link in a thread, don't just copy/paste the link into the posting box. Instead, first highlight the text you want to be linkable, and then click the icon at the top of the box that looks like a link. Doing that will call up a dialogue box that looks like this:

Then, copy/paste the URL into the box. If, say, you have highlighted text that says "Click here to go to wild.com", and then enter "http://www.wild.com" into the dialogue box, you will get a clickable link that looks like this (don't put the quote marks in the box or your highlighted text):

Click here to go to wild.com

NOTE! Please check the "Open in new window" check box, so that your links don't navigate away from your post.

For videos, if you find a YouTube or online video that you want to post in a thread or post (as opposed to a FanShot, where you can post it directly, using the Video tab), find the EMBED code on the YouTube page. It should look something like this:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="

About posting images, I know that many of you already post images in posts and game threads. Some of these are hockey-related, of players, and some aren't. Images can greatly enhance your post and add to the information and/or enjoyment that others get. I ask only that you follow a few simple rules:

● Keep images small. When I say "small" I don't necessarily mean the physical size of the image (although smaller is generally better); I mean the file size of the image you are posting. Large file size images can slow down threads, especially game threads.

● Keep images clean. They need to be SFW. Just as SB Nation and Yahoo don't want profanity on Hockey Wilderness, I don't want images that you wouldn't want to be seen viewing at work, or around your kids.