1 I vote for #5. There's no need for a "hide comments" button. If I want to see the post, I'll scroll my browser.

2 You can still hide comments by clicking on the Comments(n) link, because there's an obvious right way to handle that.

The hide comments link really should pull the text above the link downwards to fill in the gap - but as far as I know, you can't do that.  So getting rid of it may indeed be the least annoying thing.

3 I've implemented options 1, 2, 3 and 5 so that people can experiment.

4 I think we'll need more comments to test the options once it does get past a screenful.

At the moment, just hiding them seems to work fine, but I can imagine that just hiding them - when comments are more extensive - would leave you in the middle of something several posts down from where you started.  Some variety of 2 might be better, then - leave the last 2-3 lines of the post up, just as if you'd scrolled past it.

5 Hiding them without jumping does seem to have issues once the comment thread gets long enough.  My default behavior would be to read the post, read the comments, and then read the next post - so some variety of 2 is the most intuitive interface for me.  If more people reread the post (again?) after reading the comments, then 3 might be better.

Alternatively, you could just leave all options up for a week and keep count of which gets the most usage.

6 That would be tricky.  To move to the bottom of the post, I can just use an anchor tag in the template.  To move to somewhere a few lines above the bottom of the post, I'd need to insert an anchor in the body of the post itself, which I'd rather not do.

I suppose I could auto-anchor the last paragraph tag...

7 Its a nice to have. If you lost it, I'd never notice.

Clicking on the comments link is fine by me. All the screen jumpin annoys me as I need to figure out where I am in the page again.

8 Ideally, imo, clicking "hide comments" should return your browser screen to the exact display that it had when you clicked "show comments".  No matter how much you've scrolled through a lengthy thread, hiding the comments should get ya back to where you began so's you can continue from where you left off.

Oh, and Blogermeister Pam still can't reach .mu.nu at all on her home 'puter, but she can get there from work.  My own accessibility is pretty off and on.  I wanna believe that it's a viral issue on our ends, but the prob is unique to Munuvia.  Maybe some weird combination of obscure browser settings and new server specs?  I dunno.

Like I said, I've eliminated that it's not a Firefox vs. IE issue.  Debbye, the only other Munuvian that I know was having the same prob, hasn't posted in a while, but that's not unusual for her.  Don't know if others are having probs.

Pam apparantly never saw yer message at Munuviana last week, so maybe drop her a line and ask her to give you some details?  She can only post/browse .mu.nu from work, and I'd hate to see her get canned because of it.     

In the meantime, can't you just go back to what you were doing before for a while?  :P

9 Actually, I spoke to Pam and cured her problem.  I'll send you the details so you can be cured too.  I can't go back to what we had before, because the old server no longer exists, but I will look at adding a third DNS server at a different hosting company using a cheap virtual server.  I still don't know what the problem is, but that should fix it anyway.

Now, as for the hide comments, you are right; that is what it should do; but there is at present no way to get a browser to do that.

10 The close-and-do-nothing is ideal when the post hasn't scrolled off the screen.

The jump-to-top seems to be best when the post has scrolled off the screen but is itself less than a screenful.

The jump-to-bottom seems to suck in all cases.

11 I like to close the comments after reading mostly because my mouse scroll thingy doesn't work when the comments are displayed and I have to use the arrow one on the side of the screen...