Both because I thought some improvements were in order, and because I’ve had some requests for changes … I’ve done a little upgrade to the comments section of this site.

• I’ve increased the size of comments. Perviously, you were limited to 4,000 characters. I’ve increased it to 8,000.
• I’ve added a counter to tell you how many more characters you can type into the comments field before you’ve typed too many. Call this the “Matt Welch” upgrade (he was the first of three friends to get screwed by the old code, which would let you write longwinded posts, then through an error because it was too long, causing to lose all your good words).
• I’ve added the ability for you to opt-out of getting e-mail notifications of new comments being added in that thread. Keep in mind, you are automatically going to continue to get notification of comments you’ve participated in up to this point (if any new comments are added to the thread), and the opt-out works only for each individual thread … if you opt-out of one, it doesn’t mean you’ve opted out of all of them.
• I’ve changed the pop-up for comments so that it opens in the center of your screen, and it is a slightly larger window.
• I’ve done away with the requirement for a subject line on comments.

So, I hope you guys like the changes.