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We have a few site updates to announce. First, the small one: we've installed a new menu bar across the top of the page. It has the same stuff the old one did, for now, but keep an eye on it, as we'll be making some additional changes. You can use the menu bar to quickly get to the Transactions Browser and the Compensation page, just to mention a couple of the features we've released over the past few months.

 
We've also made a lot of changes to BP comments over the last week.
 
 
First of all, the userid under a comment's Display Name is now clickable and will take you to comments made by that user. From there, you can see every comment that user has submitted to the site. You can also visit any comment thread that user has participated in by using the "Go To Comment" button underneath any comment on this page.
 
You can share your comments–or any user's comments, if you want to refer to something someone else said–using the sharing tools and the short URL in the yellow box.  You can always get to your comments at http://bbp.cx/i/userid (so mine are at http://bbp.cx/i/2 ).  We know many of our subscribers have invested a lot of time and energy into crafting excellent, informative comments, and that's a great way to give people a look at your work.
 
You can also search comments. Search your own by visiting the Search page—you can click the rightmost link on the menu bar to get there. To search another user's comments, visit their comments page as above and scroll up to the search form, and you'll have the option to Search comments for user 'username,' as in the image below.
 
 
Finally, we've moved some things around on the Manage Profile page and added your most recent comments and comment search to the bottom of that page, as well. Click "manage your profile" in the blue login bar on any page of the site to get there at any time.
 
You must be a Baseball Prospectus subscriber to post comments.  You can click here for more information on subscriptions.
 
Please let us know what you think, and thanks to Rob McQuown for riding herd on the upgrades.

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chongtastic
1/26
very nice!
brownsugar
1/27
This is great and a little spooky too. I've got a couple of comments in there that were critical of others comments that I regret making (one douchy comment from me to amazinmess comes to mind, sorry about that one amazin!). Sometimes I miss the grand old days of the internet when you could download the entire collected works of Three Dog Night in total anonymity!

On the other hand, there are oodles of fun to be had here. I'm looking forward to checking how many times someone has used the word "Tango" in their comment to lend their comment more weight (sometimes quoting him properly and sometimes taking what he has previously written completely out of context).
chabels
1/27
Along these lines, perhaps giving authors the ability to delete their own comments would be useful? Editing them would be even more powerful, but I recognize that takes more server resources.
mhmosher
1/27
Oh man....I scrolled through mine - yowza. I hear ya Randy. and do not worry about it bud! I have made TONS of douchy comments myself.
dpease
1/27
there's a lot of love in this room.
stuwhite
1/27
I like the look.
jdouglass
1/27
Great stuff. I do have one request, admittedly it's kind of a complaint, but relevant to what's above.

The search function for comments should take a back seat to the search function for articles. If I search today, for example, for Daily Hit List by putting that into the find bar, I don't get a single one of the DHL pieces. I get a piece introducing the DHL (3rd in sort order behind old hit lists from 2007 and 2006), transaction analyses from 2005 (7th in sort order), and more, but not DHLs. These should arrive first.

Black out the 'Find' bar and use the article dropdown to select Daily HIt List doesn't work. Zero results. (I realize someone might chime in that "oh it's located here" and that's nice in the case of this example, but does not address that the search function on the site is broken.)

Given the amount of content on the site, it should be a priority to get the subscriber to what they want to get to as quickly and efficiently as possible. This has been a gripe of mine with the site for a while, and sorry to be complain-y in a section announcing good new stuff, but this needs attention. It's quicker to find a BP article by going to Google and searching "baseballprospectus.com" + "(what you want to find on BP)" than using the internal search. That's a black eye on the site's design and infrastructure, and I'm way more interested in that being fixed than being able to research comments.
dpease
1/27
Our current search only searches text from articles, and as we've expanded to other types of content it doesn't cover them. A revision of the search function has been on our list for a while but we'll see if we can make it work better for you incrementally.
jdouglass
1/28
Glad to hear you're working on it Dave. Typically I end up finding what I am looking for, it's just cumbersome. This I think would be particularly valuable for newer subscribers who are mining for old gold, since there's a lot of it to dig around for.
kddean
1/27
I also have a bit of a complaint. It used to be if I read an article and the comments, the next time I went to that article and there were new comments, they would be highlighted. Why did that go away?
randolph3030
1/27
If I understand your complaint correct, I think it may be your browser that is the problem. I still see this on articles I've read and viewed comments for:

"... more | 11 comments, 10 unread"

frampton
1/27
That's my experience as well, Firefox shows the "new" tag inconsistently, but IE* (at work) and Safari (on the iPad) always show it.
dpease
1/27
Sorry, we were not aware of this issue. You should always get both total and new comment count for any article (provided there are new comments). Could you please email relevant details to cs@baseballprospectus.com and we will try to fix? Thanks.
Oleoay
1/27
I've had the same issue. Firefox is inconsistent but it works fine on IE.
jjaffe
1/28
This happens to me once in awhile - intermittently and unpredictably, I'll see a piece that isn't recognizing new comments by highlighting. Will note it next time I come across it, Dave.
dpease
1/29
Thanks everyone--sounds like it might be browser specific and I don't use FF anymore. Please send us a note when you see this and we'll get it sorted.
kddean
1/27
And of course, I complain about it, and for this article, the new comments are highlighted. Same browser and all of that.
reznick
1/27
Small comment. I'm of the generation that reads better on the pressed-fiber medium than the cathode-ray screen. There's really no need for the menu bar to show up and waste toner on the "printer-friendly version". Could you remove that?
cdt719
1/28
I agree that it would look better without the grey.
dpease
1/29
Sure--we'll get that removed.
mcquown
1/31
Good catch - this has been removed now.
Oleoay
1/27
Flipping through past comments is kind of neat. Just to provide an example of what you can do with it, go back and find out the last time you had a comment that fell below the +/- threshhold or look in hindsight to find your most popular comments.
Oleoay
1/29
Little tidbit, I haven't had a comment worse than -3 since September 2010 and that was because I said I didn't drink beer.

(Though, just noticing that might earn this comment a few minuses)
Oleoay
1/29
Did you just add an "average rating" feature too?
dpease
1/30
We sure did. We have no idea if its useful or not.
Oleoay
1/30
I found it... illuminating. I'm pretty much +/- neutral but "spam" a lot of comments. Meanwhile there are others who average +1 or more.
jrmayne
1/31
I wonder who has the highest total? Highest average? (This one probably won't help me.) But it's kind of a fun feature.
Oleoay
1/31
Randy Brown's at +3 for an average and there are quite a few high average ones.

Haven't found anyone near my total comments, including BP Staff...
mikefast
2/01
You have the most comments (3450). Kevin Goldstein has the second most (2315).

Oleoay
2/01
Scary... and I haven't even been here since BP started.
brownsugar
2/01
That's because when I comment, I stick to the following themes:

1. Jeter plays terrible defense.
2. That Plaschke, he be crazy!
3. I like cake.
4. The comments rating system is un-American censorship! (Even though everyone can still read any "hidden" comment with a single mouse click, and most people seem to go out of their way to read those first.)

Maybe I should rethink that last one...
Oleoay
2/01
I'll keep those themes in mind. Lotta work to do to raise my average.

Btw there is no cake.
thegeneral13
1/30
Clearly the next logical step is advanced comment analysis. VORC, +/- added, ASTPPACO (Average Share of Total Pluses Per Article Commented On), etc. must be in some stage of development. And I assume Nate Silver will forego covering the election and spend his time modifying PECOTA to predict future commenter performance.
batts40
1/30
Is there a way we can add the ability to jump directly to the comments for articles that appear in the middle column, as we already can for articles that appear in the Blogs sidebar?
dpease
1/30
good idea! we are looking at it now.
mcquown
1/31
Done.
batts40
1/31
Thanks! That's excellent.
collins
2/03
Thanks
brucegilsen
2/08
Thanks for searchable comments! It's the thing I've been asking for!