We're always trying to keep the 'footprint' of the site pretty small while maintaining as much functionality as possible.    You've all seen 'new' versions of lots of sites that seem to add a bunch of whiz-bang stuff that developers fell in love with but for most people they take away from the speed and ease-of-use of the site.

Comments are one of those areas where you can have too much or not enough so it's better to just try things and ask what you think.    As an experiment we have added back email notifications for comments but I'll explain in some more detail all the ways you can decide what comments you want and how you want them.

First, by default your Comment Tracker in the upper right:

That 4th one on the right is new and is only activated if you are manually tracking an article using this button on an individual post:

Since it only shows up if you manually track an article you did not write with the Track Comments button above, it will not show up for you if you don't do that.   And if you do it stop, it will disappear again.

The third button with the two heads above also shows Corkboard comments for friends.   You can only see notifications for people on your Friend list so, if you have no friends, you won't get any of these.  Corkboard messages will be on top and comments by friends below it.

But for registered users who would rather get notifications on email, either for all your articles or individually, and for non-members who would like to get email notifications about comments on an article, we have added email notification globally and by individual post.

If you'd prefer email notification for all of your articles from now on, go into My Account, click Preferences and then check this box:

If you're pretty active, I wouldn't do it because comment tracker makes it easier and I hate email clutter.   So now you can track comments on your own articles, on replies, on your friends comments and on any article you want in comment tracker or by email.

Anonymous people will have that on each article they comment on.   Likewise, you can always enable/disable comment emails for yourself globally in your account settings or by your individual article.

Have we left anything out?   How do you think we should improve commenting?