New Game Day Thread System Getting Blazer’s Edge Tryout on Sunday

The Portland Trail Blazers versus Denver Nuggets game on Sunday will showcase a new feature that SBNation, our parent company, is in the process of testing for its member sites. Our normal Game Day Thread will morph for a day into a Game Day Live Chat.

The idea of the post is the same: to allow our community members to talk live during games. Instead of doing this in the comment section underneath the post, you’ll be doing it in a chat window inside the post. This pilot project is still in development. We’ll want to see how it works with our community and give feedback to the network as they continue to refine it.

How to Participate

Participation is easy.

1. The Live Chat post will take the place of the normal Game Day Thread post on Sunday. It will go live around 5:50 PM, Pacific, 10 minutes before the start of the game.
2. If you’re logged in with your Blazer’s Edge account, you’ll be able to participate. You’d have to be logged in if you were leaving comments in a normal Game Day Thread anyway, so this is no change. (You may have to confirm your email, but there’s no extra sign-up or registration necessary to participate other than having an account here.)
3. The chat will appear inside the post, not below it.
4. There will be a survey available for you to give feedback on the experience.
5. This is a one-time occurrence for now. The playoffs will operate under our normal Game Day Thread system. We do not know if or when the Live Chat will roll out for real. This is a test run.

What’s Different

The location is the most obvious difference between the chat window and the comment section, but they’ve also added functionality that should make participating in game-centered live chatting easier than it is in our more generic comment section.

• Replies to your own comments are highlighted on your screen, so you can easily see who is responding to you.
• There’s a “New” bar so you can easily identify where new comments appear if you log out for a while then come back.
• There’s also a “Jump to Live” button in case you scroll up to other comments. The conversation holds still on your screen as you’re browsing old comments and then you can jump back into the fray live with one click.
• There’s a five-minute edit feature for your comments. (The thread is live-moderated to cut down on people abusing the chat or this feature.)
• There’s an “ignore” feature, where you can personally mute people who might be getting on your nerves (unintentionally, I’m sure). You can also flag comments and moderators will see those sooner than they do under the current system.
• You can hit “enter” to post your comment.
• Conversation threads don’t indent at the margins.
• There might be an extra font or two to comment in.
• The color background for sufficient “recs” should remain.
• There will eventually be functionality for gifs and such, but they don’t have that part fully developed yet, so this test will pretty much be text-only.

The following video explains some of the features and what the network is aiming for. You can come and see, plus help them take the system where it should be, on Sunday.

Feel free to ask any preliminary questions in the comment section of this post. I’ll try to answer as best I can. Thanks for participating and let’s see how it goes!