Links to comments from front page: a pony request

December 26, 2015 9:36 PM

On the front page, the link that says "n comments" actually goes to the top of the post. For longer posts, especially on mobile, that can be a good ways away from the first comment. Can this link point to the first comment - or, since that might be deleted, to the byline at the end of the post?

I think this may have been asked before, but before the modern theme was introduced. Right now a post on the front page looks like

Post Title
Text text text text [more inside]
posted by username at 3:45 PM
4 comments (2 new) +

where "Post Title," "[more inside]," and "4 comments" all go to the top of the post. I think there's room to make one of these point to the end of the post instead. (If there is no [more inside], then the post is short enough to make scrolling unnecessary anyway.)

What do you think?

posted by zeptoweasel to Feature Requests at 9:36 PM (5 comments total)

It's come up before, yeah; the idea is understandable enough, but things working against the idea include (a) posts generally not being that long on average even if the occasional post has a whole lot of more inside and (b) reading the post rather than jumping straight to the comments being part of the expected site norm for engaging with threads.

The idea of linking in to the top of the more inside would be less of an issue on the skipping-the-post front but would also mean very little difference in target on the page since the above-the-fold portion of a post is necessarily pretty small.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:41 PM on December 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

[☝️]
posted by clavdivs at 9:42 PM on December 26, 2015

I admit it would make it easier to skip the post, but having a link that says "n comments" that doesn't actually go to the comments has always bugged me.
posted by zeptoweasel at 9:46 PM on December 26, 2015 [5 favorites]

You can skip to menu on mobile, which makes it easy enough to then just scroll up a little bit and see the last few comments.
posted by axiom at 5:29 PM on December 27, 2015

I suspect this would probably further discourage commenters from reading a post's linked content. Out of sight, out of mind. Which is already a bit of a problem.
posted by zarq at 5:49 PM on December 27, 2015 [2 favorites]