Sidepodcast - All for F1 and F1 for all

Feedback and suggestions for live commenting - A look at how far we've come and where we've still to go

Published by Mr. C

Ahead of what's looking to be an almighty season of Formula 1, we began a process of updating and enhancing Sidepodcast. Most of the changes relate to the recent increase in mobile device usage and have been well documented during the offseason.

The opening weekend of the F1 season gave us a chance to fully test the enhancements and plenty of people helped to give things a thorough test. During the past three days we live commented on a total of seven live events culminating in 4,052 comments (and counting).

Feedback on changes came thick and fast during the course of the weekend, and rather than pollute topical discussions with technical feedback, we figured it best to keep things in one place. This thread then will be the home for suggestions and feedback going forward. We'll point people in this direction during the next few months as improvements are added and issues ironed out.

Mobile homes

Sidepodcast image

As a quick refresher, Sidepodcast currently has three solutions for taking part in live events, as follows:

  • Events pages - Individual discussions for specific events
  • Dashboard - An interactive page for managing multiple discussions
  • Recent comments - Discussion updates across all live events (read-only)

As noted last December, the Dashboard is by far the most complicated page on the site and making it work on mobile devices poses something of a challenge. To that end, the page hasn't yet been fully finished, but it is at least usable for its intended purpose.

The remainder of the pages are functionally complete, but we are aware that popular events cause trouble for older machines / devices as well as less efficient browsers (notably Firefox).

Force feedback

If you've had chance to experience the new Sidepodcast live comments, we'd love to hear what you'd change or improve to make things easier and more enjoyable. We can't promise to solve everything, but we do now have time to take a step back and make things even better.

Let us know in the comments below any and all of your suggestions, feedback, complaints and more.

Updated: If you're new to live commenting or would like to experiment some more, please use this test thread and watch the various solutions update in real-time.