The new ZDNet comment system: A blow to trolls

Welcome to ZDNet's new comment system.

To post or not to post my summary of the new ZDNet rules, that is the question. Whether tis nobler to endure the slings & arrows of outraged trolls Or to take arms against a sea of spammers, And by opposing end them?

Sorry Shakespeare, I couldn't resist. The ZDNet comment system has been troubled at times. All too often it's been over-run by trolls, sometimes visited by spammers, and often troublesome to navigate, Now, ZDNet has indeed taken arms against the trolls and spammers with its comment system update.

The major changes are:

Navigation: Users can now use navigate up or down through each comment (and there are shortcut keyboard keys we can use)

Voting: User's can now vote on a comment

Collapsed View: we haven't had this since when relaunched,  we have brought it back, so that users can see a tree or collapsed view of all comments, which helps to quickly scan comments

New messaging order and status settings: These are: Most recent comment; Editor's pick, manually selected by editor; and Top Rated - Highest number of positive votes from users.

New icons (staff, groups): Adding in the ability for each icon grouping to have their own icons: ZDNet Staff, ZDNet Moderator, and ZDNet Writer

Pagination for Talkback: With this upgrade, we brought back pagination (and removed the "view more" button that user's were unhappy with)

Registration Posting changes: A user will now have to register or log-in before they begin typing a comment, which will avoid lost posts that happened when users would type up a post, register, confirm, and then go back to the blog post (and comment was lost).

Alerts: Adding the ability for users to get alerted when updates are made to the comment thread.

The goal is to improve the quality of our online forums, help clear out message trash, and make our story comments more interesting and useful to you.

This has just been introduced, so will be some teething problems along the way. But it is indeed our most fervent hope to make ZDNet comments useful. Thanks for your help in advance. You'll be a big part of making this work.