1. Click on your UserID at the top of the screen to access settings.

2. Click on "Edit Settings" towards the top right.

3. Go to the Default Comment Format that probably says "expanded"

4. Change it to "closed"

5. Click "Update" at the bottom of the menu to save your changes.

This way, when you open up a thread that has new comments, only the Subject and the "by-line" show up. To get the rest of the comment, you simply click on the bolded subject. (Note: you may click on the subject and sometimes nothing happens-this is because the user only typed something in the subject and not in the text box.)

On BlogaBull, for fun, I let FasterFox time the loading for a huge 447 comment thread.

Time to load:

Expanded comments, Avatar shown: 153.3 seconds

Expanded comments, No avatars shown: 109.7 seconds

Closed comments, Avatar shown: 15.8 seconds

Closed comments, No avatars shown: 15.2 seconds

As you can see, this has significantly reduced loading time. For me, the 400+ comments in the last thread took about 1min30 sec the old way, but only around 15 secs. this way. Hope it helps.