Comment extravaganza, or on the recent improvements to commenting experience on Codidact

This post focuses on the work we've done over the past couple of months to make commenting experience on the network better for everyone. I tried to outline as many changes as I could here, but do check up on the Recent feature changes post for 2025 for a comprehensive list (we've also made a lot of fixes and feature request changes that are not comments-related).

Improvements to comment rate limits

First of all, we are now much more upfront as to whether you can create comment threads or reply to existing ones — the buttons are always shown but disabled if you can't use them at this point for some reason (instead of letting you carefully craft your replies only to be slapped with an error message upon submission) with the exact reason shown on hover:

What's more, communities are now able to decide whether they want to allow new users (that is, those without the Participate Everywhere ability) to comment on posts of others (as opposed to only being able to comment on their own posts and answers to them).

Important note for site admins

2 new site settings are now available under the "Rate limits" section:

• RL_NewUserCommentsOwnPosts for users without the Participate Everywhere ability when commenting on their own posts (or answers to them), set to 30 by default;

• RL_CommentsOwnPosts for users with the Participate Everywhere ability when commenting on their own posts (or answers to them), set to 50 by default;

Improvements to inline thread views

Secondly, quite a few changes have been made to the inline thread views (when you expand a thread under a post's list of comment threads).

Large threads now take much less space and have a more consistent feel to them (it's still necessary to open the full view to show all comments on large threads, but we are already working on making it an inline action):

Eagle-eyed readers might've noticed that there's now a "Reply to this thread" button at the bottom of the thread — yes, it's finally possible to reply to threads without having to open the full view:

What one might've also noticed is that all actions on comments can now be taken inline too, including editing, deletion, undeletion, and flagging:

We haven't forgotten about curators and moderators either — if you have the necessary abilities and/or roles, all thread actions are now available to you from the inline view too:

Improvements to thread titles

Lastly, we made a couple of upgrades for thread titles.

It used to be that if you referred to someone via an @-mention in a thread title, we would show the mention as is (with bare user id) — this is no longer the case. Provided the mentioned users still exist when you view such threads, we now render the mentions with usernames:

As a consequence of the above, @-mention autocomplete is now available for the thread title fields both when creating new ones and renaming existing ones (for those who can do that).

Additionally, thread titles now sanitize formatting away as they are always rendered as plain text. In the screenshot below, the thread's title is automatically generated from its content — previously, you would've seen "> This is a quote **bold**, *italic*, and ~~strikethrough~~" rendered instead:

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P.S. Should you notice any issues with the updates or want us to improve anything, please let us know via an answer here or a standalone Meta post (do check whether there's an existing report or a feature request, though, as it might very well be that we are on it already).