We've relaunched community comments

Last year we rebuilt Exercism with a new focus around more formal mentoring. As part of that change we disabled the ability for the wider community to comment on each other's solutions. The logic for that was a desire to keep the learning experience in more private, safe spaces, and avoid random unsolicited comments from strangers.

I'm now happy to announce that we've reintroduced community comments on solutions. Our rational for this is that others' solutions provide a valuable learning opportunity, and we want to give people the ability to ask questions about ideas or techniques they see in solutions. We actively don't want this to be a second-stage of public mentoring, and as such we've added a notice to remind commenters of the purpose of the box:

We also know that many users do not want others to be able to comment on their solutions. They might still want to make them public, but don't want the extra interactions, or the "messiness" of having others' thoughts on their showcased work. We've therefore added an option to turn commenting on or off per solution, which can be accessed through the "Manage Public Solutions" option on your profile. To make this quicker, we've added a global option to set a default for new solutions. Next time you log in, you'll see a modal asking you what you would like to set your default to:

In parallel, we've also replaced the "reactions" that we launched last year with a more simplified starring system. If you see a solution that you like you can quickly star it (top right of the page) and it will then appear on your "Starred Solutions" page available via the main menu under your avatar. We had initially introduced this feature as an interesting way to group solutions by different people's reactions, but we now have more extensive plans to group solutions using static analysis of the code, and so have decided to retire this feature and simplify the user experience.

You can find others solutions via the "View community solutions" link once you've finished being mentored on a Core Exercise, or once you've submitted a Side Exercise. Keep an eye out for something like this:

We hope you'll get lots of enjoyment from community solutions and benefit from learning from others' work. If you run into any problems, please open an issue on our GitHub issue tracker. Thanks for reading!