Comment Snaking? The Unbounded Snake? WordPress Comments Ouroborosified? Still haven’t hit upon the just-right name, but she is here – the comment thread version of Santanico Pandemonium.
As some of you have noticed, and as described in the prior development post, I recently began turning comments back from the far right margin upon their arrival at “max depth.” What this means, as I believe limited testing has already shown and as I had suspected might be the case, is that some conversations that might previously have tended to lose energy, trapped on the far right margin in a single column, now may tend to go longer as discussants try to work out whatever it is they’re trying to work out – a good thing if you’re in favor of conversation, and, if you’re not in favor of conversation, then you’re in the wrong place.
Under the initial installation and formatting of “unbounded nesting,” comments would bounce off the right margin at depth 10, then eventually hit the left margin at depth 20, and form a single column there. (Another alternative would have been to let them continue on past the normal boundaries of the site and sooner or later of your monitor!) Under the reign of the Snake, they’ll just start heading right again, then left again, then right again, not quite ad infinitum, but in that general direction as some day next year some election horse-race sub-thread on “What Game of Thrones Tells Us about Libertarians” goes into the 1000s of comments, and hits depth-level 100 and beyond…
Below find a demo. I’d have included an appropriate soundtrack, but we’re very careful about copyright infringement in these here parts, plus I don’t want to be caught stealing on YouTube either (and have the video taken down) – but you can achieve the same effect if you just play the both YouTubes below simultaneously.
Front page featured image from From Dusk Til Dawn (the Series) on El Rey Network (Publicity Photo).
