Summary is not a good tool to break reading barriers
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So I went into the The Official "Likes" Thread section of the forum and found out that it is very long. So I thought "Hey, why not see what posts are liked the most or whatever the summary actually summarizes by". Now I can finally quickly read the summarized thread....except I can't because :
938 Posts is still a barrier to reading!
Bonus WTF for not seeing the 3 posts that it tells me... but thats old news.
So why is there a summary feature that does not work on long threads (that need to be summarized) but only on threads of mediocre length? Why is there no option to tell Discourse how many posts a summary is supposed to have?
I am aware that the original thread is very long and therefor it is kind of an edge-case... but a summary only works on edge-cases so I feel my post is justified.
Filed Under: Summary is doing it wrong tm | This is not a bug per se, so I chose the Meta-category... am I understanding this correctly? | Please note how skillfully I anonymized the first post! You totally can't tell who posted that!
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So why is there a summary feature that does not work on long threads
Because the Likes Thread is intentionally broken.
Don't blame Discourse for this.Plenty of things to blame DC for, but not this.
I am aware that the original thread is very long and therefor it is kind of an edge-case.
No, it's an edge case because all posts have many likes.
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Plenty of things to blame DC for, but not this.
You could make the argument that the broken summary feature is only there to deal with the problems of broken-by-design infinite scrolling.
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You could make the argument that the broken summary feature is only there to deal with the problems of broken-by-design infinite scrolling.
You would be wrong, but you could do that.
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Because the Likes Thread is intentionally broken.Don't blame Discourse for this.
Plenty of things to blame DC for, but not this.
So you are telling me the forum-software that supplies a feature that is supposed to give me a short version of a thread which is not working beacuse people spammed likes (something everybody in every discourse-version ever can do, afaict) is nothing to place blame for?
I know it's hard to pinpoint the crucial posts neccessary for a summary. And going by likes (and replies... I hope it uses replies more than likes, actually) is a good starting point but not limiting the maximum length of the summary seems foolish.
In one thread it will tell you "this thread has 53 replies and thats too long to read, here is your summary" while on this thread it tells you "Oh boy, better read this 1000 post summary", geez thanks Discourse.... make up your mind as to what is long and what isn't.
It's not the most important problem Discourse is having (that, for me, is the unavailability of an advanced search site... because that's totally hard to implement (I am not talking about pseudo-random search-parameters the search box may or may not actually care about but whatever) )
Filed Under: If you have a feature that breaks when people do what they can easily do...is that still a feature?
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I'm not saying summary isn't broken in general.
I'm saying in this case it's broken not because of thread length, but because of abuse.
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Everyone in the Likes thread is liking every single post. Likes have no meaning there. It's definitely abuse, and I'm proud of it.
I'm still hoping to find some quirky Discourse bugs in that thread due to like abuse but it hasn't happened. I guess I used all my luck up with The MegaPollâ„¢.
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Everyone in the Likes thread is liking every single post.
Yeah, I get that... but if that is the case the summary would give me even more results (not just 25% of all posts) and it also shows that likes are not the best medium to go by... plus there is still the issue of maybe limiting the summary to a humanly readable size...
Filed Under: I don't even know what to say anymore
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Filed Under: I don't even know what to say anymore
Well, to make up a Bad Car Analogyâ„¢, we're the morons who are towing a fully-loaded RV trailer across the country with a 4-cylinder Honda Accord just to see what happens, and you're the guy who just hopped in the passenger seat and now you're upset that you can't see the road through the tons of white smoke the transmission is producing between tranny rebuilds.
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the way I see it, is that you guys just honked a lot and therefor the car just lost the feature of looking through the windshield... and thats kinda weird... Then again, we ARE talking about Discourse,..
(because seriously, liking things is nothing more than honking.... welll flagging would be even better as honking, but you see what I am getting at, right?)
Actually, here is a better analogy that moves slightly away from cars (and is therefor not as good!):
Discourse is the a map, you guys just scribbled hearts all over the place to mark absolutely every tree in existence ever.... The map gives me the option to only look at the marks but doesn't consider that since the whole map is covered it doesn't offer me any better view anymore. And here I am, complaining about that because maps and marks and stuff!
Filed Under: Lesson learned, don't lower the opacity of the windshield... might be important later on | Also: leave the maps alone, guys!
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Perhaps if there are disproportionately many likes for a thread, the summary feature should be disabled?
Pshaw, that's silly talk.
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Just because we've deliberately spammed likes on that thread, making one of the thread summary criteria useless, doesn't mean that the thread summary shouldn't continue to work at least partially based on the other criteria.
I've not found the summary to be anything close to useful anyway, even outside the likes thread.
And, as <a @codingwhore1 will happily link to his blog to prove, if you're not reading every single post in a thread, you're doing it wrong™®
1 - Another day, another glorious markdown "feature" discovered
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There's criteria other than likes? If so, what the fuck is it?
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Given how useful the damn thing is, I'm suspecting
thread.posts.sample(10)
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No, it can't be nearly as simple as that. Everything in Discourse tries to pre-empt how the user would actually use it. Remember examples like the @ complete function, which would prioritise people 'in topic' vs people 'outside topic' without worrying about names so much.
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Maybe the summary should just list every single unique/distinct word used in the topic?
Though the Likes topic would still probably be over a hundredpagesinfiniscrolls long.
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Maybe the summary should just list every single unique/distinct word used in the topic?Though the Likes topic would still probably be over a hundred pages infiniscrolls long.
Wordmaps FTW!
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What about Mind Maps?
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Too tree-like. We need a general graph! And a colonel subject.
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The winner of each match is the person that ate the other person.
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I know he used that image as a joke (and you used it as a derived joke) but it really irritates me! It's a periodic attractor mapping, not a one-on-one competition.
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Oh hah bloody hah. I know where the image came from originally.
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Too tree-like.
True. :( But on the other hand the stuff wiggles and moves when you mouse over them in Mind Map…
@ben_lubar said:
The winner of each match is the person that ate the other person.
I know he used that image as a joke (and you used it as a derived joke) but it really irritates me! It's a periodic attractor mapping, not a one-on-one competition.We need a general graph!
How about a tag-cloud where the "hits" cycle in a Lorentzian style attractor arrangement around the various search terms?
Atractor de Lorenz – 05:53
— Pablo Groisman
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How about a tag-cloud where the "hits" cycle in a Lorentzian style attractor arrangement around the various search terms?
No tesseracts? Dissapoint.
Filed under: 3D is a barrier to tagging
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Given you need to actually click on a moving "hit" while it spirals around in 3D (otherwise why bother ) that's your fourth demention (not fixing typo on porpoise). (the dimension being of course, rage).
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Wordmaps FTW!
<img src='/uploads/default/4374/7c54ae724f4d1d75.jpg'>
Needs moar RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARKs.
Edit: Fixed broken quoting.
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Running a reverse image search on this broke Google:
Filed under: black is white, up is down, cats and dogs living together, etc.
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You're google might be broken but mine is in perfect shape
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I was replying to Ben L., as the totally discoverable and evident in-reply-to indicator would tell you.
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Running a reverse image search on this broke Google:
hmm - I got exactly the same on my phone yesterday. Trying again this morning at work, and I got the right hit.
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The winner of each match is the person that ate the other person.
I'm more excited about this match: