Continuing this series, here are two screenshots of the "View Story" page. As you can see on the first one, the right side of the screen (the context-sensitive area) shows the "Comment Filter" box. I have been working on ways to smooth the management of comments and discussions, and this comment filter plays a large role. Notice the slider? Yeap, you can drag that cursor up and down to set the threshold of comment visibility. In this case, only comments with a rating above "0" are shown. Moreover, the comment filter allows you to set a number of overrides (such as "always show comments from friends") to the threshold.

The second screenshot shows part of the comment area of the same "View Story" page. The mouse pointer is hovering over the "+1" button in the comment rating bar, and a tooltip appears describing that action (unfortunately, the programme I used to capture the screenshots doesn't show the actual mouse pointer, but it is there).

Notice the funky looking buttons on the top right corner of each comment? They are also a big help in managing comment visibility. The first one (✷) expands all descendant comments, the second (✧) collapses them all, and the third (✿) resets their display to match the current settings of the comment filter. At last, the fourth button is either ✖ or ✚, allowing you to close/open the current comment.