We pimp our comments section, go make your “First!” useful

The recent Facebook Connect integration in our comments system opened the door to cool new features. Now you can edit your comments and posts, upvote helpful ones and you can even change the sorting logic of the existing pool of opinions.

Starting today, you have a 10 minute window to edit your comments right after posting them, as long as you're logged on (more on how and why here). Now you can go back and fix that pesky spelling mistake or add more stuff to the comment. Sure sounds like a handy thing for posting "First!" to claim the top spot and then quickly going back to put down a more meaningful opinion before our moderators delete your post.

The second new feature we introduce has been up and running for a while now, but it's only now that it's ready for prime time - such as the voting system for the comments. As long as you're logged on, you can upvote comments you like and find useful. If you change your mind or misclick you can take your vote back.

Retracting your vote also requires a sign in, but can be done later - days or even months after you upvoted a comment. Note that you can only remove your upvotes, you cannot downvote.

Upvoting is helpful to everyone, not just people who have linked their Facebook account. This is because all visitors can now sort comments by date (ascending or descending) and more importantly, they can be sorted by rating. Voting and sorting works on all comments - in news, reviews and at the phone specification pages.

Hopefully, with time poor comments and trolling will sink to the bottom and useful comments will rise to the top - many phones have thousands and thousands of comments (even some news articles comments get hundreds of posts), so by putting useful comments upfront, the comments sections will become much more useful.

And one last thing - we introduced visual autocomplete for our Phone finder a while back to make finding a specific model faster. Now the same feature is available in our compare page when you are searching for a model for comparison.

Here's how to get in on the action

To make use of the new comments goodies, you should sign in with your Facebook account and pick a nickname to use for our website (do it here). If you don't have a Facebook account or you don't want to use it for authentication (we won't post anything to your wall), then you will not have access to some of the new features and probably some of the comments enhancement we plan to introduce in the future.

Once you're in, though, give those new features a shot and tell us what you think!