*NEW* Comments & The Benefits of Working With a Feature Flag

This article was originally published on October 18th, 2016

Earlier this year, with the news that Disqus would soon begin incorporating ads into their commenting modules we made a decision to switch to a new comment provider. After much research our product team found Spot.IM and, excited by the features and support they could offer us, it was decided that they would be *it*. But unlike just adding a new site feature, having to maintain commenting abilities while switching from one third party vendor to another would come with its own complexities. One way we minimized these and made it easier for our partners at Spot.IM to work with us was through the use of a feature flag.

Truth be told, our team loves feature flags and we use them whenever possible. Feature flag development that allows us to push code changes to production is great for us because…

• Our team deploys code on a CI schedule (any time, all the time) so releasing to production fast and often is needed to ensure that our code changes don’t become quickly outdated.
• We can do additional testing in production with 100% confidence. Of course we do testing in pre-production environments before release too but staging stacks are not quite a 1:1 predictor of how something will behave in production. Reason being, it’s hard to mimic things like traffic and CDN rules.
• Feature flags give us a lot of control so we can do scaled roll outs or a/b testing if desired. (Note: We didn’t do this for new comments but we will be for a project coming soon.)
• It makes launching something very easy… in most cases we just remove the flag and DONE!

Be sure to check out the new commenting tools on Refinery29. In addition to the way we’ve customized our icons and anonymous user names, Spot.IM has more features that we’ll be looking to add in the future like on-site notifications and a “news feed” service that shows users all of the conversation happening on Refinery29.

– Brittnee Cann, QA Team Lead