Introducing In-line commenting on 4CAST & other updates

For the past few years, 4CAST has gone under a lot of changes, in terms of functionalities and rich user experience. Being a publication, which believes in design and user engagement, we researched on things that mattered the most. Today, we are announcing a new feature that would enhance our readers’ experience, along with a lot of bug fixes.

About two years back, we had a huge problem on 4CAST, that we were struggling to manage. And that was the commenting problem. During the WWDC 2011 live blog, our website carried over a million users concurrently. The servers were running hot, and our pockets were burnt. On quickly analysing the areas where we were bleeding traffic, we found that it was our commenting system, where users were discussing about the happenings on stage. After a while, we had to shut down the commenting system on our live blog page, to reduce the server load, and to accommodate more users. We worked for days together to analyse the best commenting system, and for years, we tried different third-party commenting platform. But we were not satisfied with any.

Giving our users the best user experience is at the core of 4CAST and Skcript. Starting today, you will see a small ‘+’ sign towards the end of each paragraph in an article. These signs are really powerful, letting you to voice your views wherever you want in an article.

These signs, when clicked will give you the ability to comments on that particular part of the article, right there. This is not all, it works throughout the article. If you think there is something that you need to tell other users in a sentence, its easy. Just select that particular part of a sentence, and you will be greeted with a neat little popup, letting you to either share or comment the selected text.

These are called Sidenotes, and this is powered by Livefyre. The company which shares our vision for the future of web and user experience.

The technology also works flawlessly on mobile devices too. We have been testing this feature internally for weeks, and today, we couldn’t be much happier than this.

Besides these feature roll-outs, we made our Feature posts looks even more beautiful. A lot of bugs were also fixed in this version (v3.0.7). We are constantly looking for feedback, and please keep them coming. Critics and Competitors, see you soon!

Originally published at blog.skcript.com on May 29, 2014.