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Brew Hoop Night Shift: Community Checkup Edition

It’s a Friday night, so you know what that means: introspection!

Every evening at 8:00 pm central (or in this case, whenever), this all-purpose thread goes up, and the comments section is where it’s going down. What Bucks news did we not cover? What topics do you want to break down further? Or is there something non-Bucks that you want to bounce off of one another? Even something non-basketball? This is the place.


Hello everyone. How are you doing? No, really, how are you?

It’s a weird time in the world right now, and on a day where the Milwaukee Bucks don’t play (though they’ll be in action tomorrow against the Dallas Mavericks!), I think this is as good a time as any to take a pulse of our active members and see what’s what.

Coral is coming...eventually

If you’re unfamiliar, you can get up to speed here. That post even has Coral active, so you can use the system yourself, if you dare.

To fend off any concern, I can share that I do not know the timeline for when this might affect Brew Hoop. At present, the new system has been implemented at SBNation.com as well as a number of our NFL sister sites (including my old stomping grounds, Acme Packing Company). I’ll be honest, there is a ton of concern from a number of communities and moderators about the new system. I have a fair bit of experience with large-scale system updates and change management (including upgrading to Chorus, SB Nation’s current editorial tool), so I know that it’s never as good as the product team promises it will be, just as it’s usually not as bad as the loyalists claim.

That being said, the time to make your voice heard as a member of this community is now. Not when the transition happens, now. At present, these are the features that will not be included on current rollouts of Coral, and things that I know I would miss:

  • Comments are no longer displayed in chronological order with a time stamp; only parent comments can be sorted.
  • Clicking the z-key on a computer (or “Next Unread” on mobile) no longer takes you to the next unread comment.
  • New comments are no longer differentiated by color.
  • Moderation actions are limited to network-wide bans, or individual-controlled “Ignore”. There is other, automated functionality that I do not know the details of yet.
  • Avatars and signatures are not available.
  • Comments no longer have subject lines.
  • Not all comments on a post are visible; you have to click “read more” to open a full comment thread’s replies, or “show more” at the bottom of the page to show more overall comments.

There might be more, but I don’t have it top-of-mind right now. But try it for yourself, and follow the advice that I posted in my own comment on the above-linked FAQ post.

I have another question / a suggestion for a feature / improvement.

That’s great! We’d love to hear from you. You can contact the team that works on this system here: support@coralproject.net

Stay on target...or not?

The world is always bigger than basketball, but the events we’ve been navigating in 2020 have seemingly dwarfed the sport. The COVID-19 pandemic. The widespread civil unrest sparked by the death of George Floyd (though his name is sadly only one of many). The looming 2020 election and everything that comes with it. Those are only three of the events that have rocked the world, and our community is not immune to that.

We are a basketball website, and we will remain a basketball website. At the same time, when current events, politics, and social movements overlap with our sport, our team, and our city, so too do they overlap with our conversations on this basketball website. A number of those conversations have been civil and respectful. A number of them have not, and action has been taken in some cases but perhaps not all where it should have been. We want your honest feedback on the tone of the comments over the past six months or so.

What’s working? What’s not?

What sort of content have we come up with that you’ve enjoyed? What are you missing, or what have you not really liked? To reiterate, this is as good an opportunity as any for us to get tuned up. The playoffs are just around the corner, after all...


As a general rule, non-basketball topics are permitted in an open thread, provided that they follow the SB Nation Community Guidelines.