Coral, our new commenting system, is coming soon!

We’ve got big news for the community here at Windy City Gridiron. We’re rolling out a new commenting system called Coral across all of our NFL communities over the next couple of weeks.

We debuted this system in five communities on Monday, Aug. 3: Arrowhead Pride, Behind the Steel Curtain, Blogging the Boys, Silver & Black Pride, and SBNation.com. You can visit any of those sites to get a feel for how the new comment system works and what the user interface and experience are like.

We know it will take some time to get used to it – and this isn’t the end of its development; all we ask is that you spend some time with Coral and give us your feedback so we can keep improving the system across all of our communities.

The rest of the NFL sites will be transitioned to Coral over the next couple of weeks. The full schedule is below:

Thursday, August 6th

Cincy Jungle
Bolts from the Blue
Turf Show Times
Pats Pulpit
Big Blue View
Bleeding Green Nation
Niners Nation

Monday, August 10th

Revenge of the Birds
The Falcoholic
Baltimore Beatdown
Buffalo Rumblings
Cat Scratch Reader
Windy City Gridiron
Dawgs By Nature
Mile High Report
Pride of Detroit
Acme Packing Company

Tuesday, August 11th

Battle Red Blog
Stampede Blue
Big Cat Country
The Phinsider
Daily Norseman
Canal Street Chronicles
Gang Green Nation
Field Gulls
Bucs Nation
Music City Miracles
Hogs Haven

We will be rolling Coral out across all of our team communities in the future, but there’s no timetable for that at the moment. The purpose of rolling this out in our NFL communities first is to test the system and gather feedback from site managers, contributors, moderators, and community members. We’ll be improving the way Coral works on our SB Nation communities based on your feedback, on those sites and on others as we roll them out. Your feedback and experience will help make it an even better platform over the next few months and years.

Why are we changing things up now? Our existing comment system hasn’t been upgraded in a decade and its age makes it difficult to maintain and update. It’s clunky on mobile devices, which many readers use to read and comment. The mobile experience in Coral is a major upgrade. We also have some fun tools in the works that will enhance the Game Thread experience in our communities, like automatically dropping in highlights of big plays and score updates as our communities discuss games. Coral offers expansive tools that will make our moderators’ lives so much easier — that’s an improvement that won’t be as obvious to commenters, but is essential for supporting the community’s health.

Coral is an improvement, and an investment in the future of our communities. It looks and feels very different from the current comment system, and like any new system, will take some time to get used to.

We’ve added the ability to change how you sort comments (Newest/Oldest/Most Recs/Most Replies), to download your comments, and to get email notifications around replies. You can ignore annoying voices, and embed tweets/YouTube videos just by pasting the URL instead of the long embed code. You can also search for GIFs using the GIF selector. We’ve also kept a lot of things you love, like Recs and background comment colors.

Some things haven’t made the cut, like avatars, signatures, and photo uploads. Yellow backgrounds for new comments aren’t currently available, nor are shortcuts to jump between comments — we’re working out the best ways to help you find the latest comments posted in Coral. You’ll also notice that your comments and comment history from the old system will disappear when we flip the switch to activate Coral on this site, and comments will not be available temporarily on FanPosts and FanShots. Don’t worry — those will be back in the future.

We have a frequently asked questions post available here that should give you more insight into why we’re making this change and what the new system entails. In the meantime, please feel free to share any questions or feedback in the comments below.