Front-page Comments Idea

Waaaiiiiiiittttttttttttt........... you think that's what it is? That they deliberately contrive awkwardness into the product to increase revenue?
I can't for a moment imagine that a company as progressive and philanthropic as Oracle would stoop that low.

Now... where were we? Oh yeah, front-page comments.

c__

@apapadimoulis said:

3. Users can post anonymous comments on front page by entering captcha
a. this uses a special account we create

But wouldn't this mean all anon posts get the same account name? :-s

@VinDuv said:

Some TDWTF article comments are funny because of their unregistered user names. Keeping that feature would be nice.

So would this still be possible?

c__

@mark_bowytz said:

when I hit a comment page, I want to see the most recent message in a thread before contributing, not (potentially) four messages ago.

If it's share-personal-technique time, when i hit a comment page, it's almost always the first. I'm just looking at what subjects developed, before discussions went off-track (or started repeating themselves).* Rarely, when i see a point that wasn't properly followed-up on (within that first page), i check later pages for replies to that specific id, to decide if i would add my 2c or not. (This is something that DC would actually help with, through its "Replies" button, so that i wouldn't load all the other posts at all.)

^* I just don't have enough time to read all replies, especially since some days i don't visit at all, and then the articles and their comment pages add up.

end

To enter a topic at the top, click or tap the first post date in the topic list. And to enter at the bottom, ditto for the last post date.

c__

Yes, well it would be quite a WTF if the software didn't allow "to enter a topic at the top". But my point was that in some outlying cases (like mine, as opposed to Mark's) it would help to be reminded by the interface when the first one-page-worth (default: 50) of posts have been all read.

Also, considering you said Discourse wasn't optimized at all for reading backwards, it's strange that you suggest anyone "to enter at the bottom"... Although, Mark DOES* appear to ask for just that: enter at the "most recent message" and disregard anything before that. So then i suppose you did well to keep the ubiquitous "Go to last message" of every other forum software.

^* PS italics breaking font-size is quite annoying.

end

The progress bar at the bottom right will show you exactly where you are in the topic, by number (43 of 50), and by overall percentage (green bar on grey bg).

Filed under: Hey, books also have a progress indicator at the bottom right of every page! What a coincidence..

c__

... but books also have a habit of marking specific parts of them as "next chapter", so you know where the recommended stop points are... And papyrus scrolls could too, but DC infiniscroll doesn't have any such affordance, in its current design.

ben_lubar

If you think you can divide TDWTF forum topics into parts, go ahead and try.

Filed under: reaches for popcorn

c__

Ben...

@c__ said:

it would help to be reminded by the interface when the first one-page-worth (default: 50) of posts have been all read

Are you saying "chunks of 50 posts" (plus the useful "# Replies" buttons) don't count as "divid[ing] forum topics into parts"?!

Maciejasjmj

@ben_lubar said:

If you think you can divide TDWTF forum topics into parts, go ahead and try.

Filed under: reaches for popcorn

Original topic
Random mention in tags of some unrelated stuff
150 posts elaborating on this unrelated stuff
Ben L. speaking in Lojban about Go
Introducing newcomers to Monty Hall paradox
Blakeyrant
Sarcastic remarks on forum software
A failed attempt to revive the original topic
More forum software bashing
Discussion shifts to US politics, all is lost

end

Not unless you think this is a good chapter arrangement for a book:

Chapter 1: pages 1 - 50
Chapter 2: pages 51 - 100
Chapter 3: pages 101 - 150

New linked topics is a better analog for chapters, really, as chapters have titles and tend to mark thematic or literal turning points in the story.

c__

At least it's better than:

The One Chapter: pages 1 - 142.

I get the impression you're trying to have meaningful separation of TDWTF forum topics into parts... Not worth the effort, IMO. Artificial separation into fixed-length parts is way easier instead.

By the way, i don't mean actual pagination. Just some floatie telling me something to the effect of "you're now reading posts that would have been on the 2nd page". Some infiniscroll blogs do that, IIRC.

Onyx

@Maciejasjmj said:

- Blakeyrant

I wish... I miss him. And morbs. Such level of sheer insanity cannot be emulated, we need them back.

If they are not back in a few days I'm mounting a mission. Anyone interested in joining is welcome. Bring your own purple dildo, we ran out of stock.

end

Morbs going missing is particularly odd since he wasn't hating Discourse. Blakey should know we fixed several of the things he brought up.

Send them both all my love

Filed under: why, yes, my kind of love does involves fisting

skotl

You know what...? I'd be really interested to hear what @codinghorror et al have learned about how more chaotic forums, such as this, conflicts with their original ideas for Discourse.
I don't mean "we added this feature, or made this task faster" but more on how the admittedly unusual way that we treat discussions/topics fits with the utopian view that they were pushing for with Discourse. More "we figured people would do X when faced with A, but people here do Y instead, so we needed to change B"

Maciejasjmj

@codinghorror said:

Morbs going missing is particularly odd since he wasn't hating Discourse.

http://youtu.be/OHOMp25Hr3c?t=20s

@codinghorror said:

Filed under: why, yes, my kind of love does involves fisting

Another wonderful image for the night, thank you very much.

Also, it would be very nice if every single keystroke in the editor didn't try to refresh the embedded YouTube miniature in preview...

Edit: To reproduce, you need a "Start from..." link. For added amusement, fire up Task Manager and observe every keystroke eating up another meg of RAM.

Crunger

@codinghorror said:

How do you enforce this without putting an undue burden on the community? There's a fundamental disconnect: it's near-zero effort to leave drive-by strafing run trash (a negative, hateful, or stupid comment) without some kind of registration system. So the effort to clean up the trash, and the effect it has on the community, is disproportionate. Littering becomes way too easy.

Littering already is "too" easy for TDWTF commentors, and somehow the website has persisted without being buried in garbage. (I haven't been the one who had to take out that trash, but @apapadimoulis doesn't seem to think it is a huge problem, either.)

@codinghorror said:

Too much emphasis on easy anon also doesn't encourage people to join the community except in a superficial way, and is kind of negative for the health of the community in the long term. Everyone is "just passing through", so why would they care about anything there?

This logic seems front-to-back to me. People sign up and contribute if a community is (or seems like it will be) worthwhile. Making people contribute doesn't improve the community, if anything, it seems like an admission that the community can't sustain itself with voluntary participation.

I hope you'll relent and implement some type of anon with configurable user names. That has been part of the fun all these years, but for the longest time, I could not register on the front page, and had no choice but to be anonymous. Discourse has been a breath of fresh air.

sam

@Crunger said:

anon with configurable user names.

Technically I am struggling to figure out how this is feasible without poisoning the user database. I guess you would need to introduce a concept of user types and have special styling with no uniqueness requirements on usernames for anon.

c__

yeah... it figures that it is technically difficult, but i believe the "anon with specified username" possibility is quite sine-qua-non here at TDWTF... Probably part of why Discourse has met so much resistance.

error

@sam said:

Technically I am struggling to figure out how this is feasible without poisoning the user database. I guess you would need to introduce a concept of user types and have special styling with no uniqueness requirements on usernames for anon.

if you just showed their Display Name (like the site strongly implies) you could avoid this issue. Avoid impersonation by making the user icon something recognizable.

Filed under: Then watch us all start using @anonymous_coward's avatar.

ender

@sam said:

Technically I am struggling to figure out how this is feasible without poisoning the user database. I guess you would need to introduce a concept of user types and have special styling with no uniqueness requirements on usernames for anon.

Look at how eg. Techdirt does it. Allows anonymous comments, lets you enter an e-mail when you comment anonymously, if you later register with that same e-mail, it links those comments with your account.

PJH

@codinghorror said:

Hey, books also have a progress indicator at the bottom right of every page! What a coincidence..

[citation required]

boomzilla

@codinghorror said:

Morbs going missing is particularly odd since he wasn't hating Discourse.

He comes and goes. I've never heard him speak of Michelangelo.

@codinghorror said:

Blakey should know we fixed several of the things he brought up.

He'll come crawling back eventually. He needs an outlet for his rage.

@codinghorror said:

Filed under: why, yes, my kind of love does involves fisting

Filed Under: Not with a bang but a whimper

apapadimoulis

Thinking on this further, my reasoning seems to have been... there have been quality comments left by anonymous visitors, thus those quality comments would not exist if not for anonymous.

It's entirely possible that they would have just registered and posted anyway. no way to know unless we try it. As long as that process is fairly painless. And, maybe we disable some of those strict new-user restrictions.

antiquarian

@boomzilla said:

codinghorror said:
Blakey should know we fixed several of the things he brought up.

He'll come crawling back eventually. He needs an outlet for his rage.

I think slashdot would work just as well for that purpose.

boomzilla

@antiquarian said:

I think slashdot would work just as well for that purpose.

Could be.

maciejas_jmj

Hey, it turns out you can post anonymously. You just need an email invite!

Filed under: wait what

Maciejasjmj

Oh wait, no. It turns out it actually immediately creates an account for you with your email name as an username and logs you in once you click the link.

And it seems like if you log out before setting the password, you're screwed.

end

You can still follow the invite link for a period of time after redeeming the invite.

Maciejasjmj

Still, it doesn't warn you about creating an actual account on click, with your email name nonetheless. From how the email is worded ("so you'll be able to post a reply immediately, without needing to log in."), I'd expect to - well - not be logged in.

Oh, and the default settings also involve spamming you with replies ~~to the topic.~~

end

Not exactly, tracking (after replying to a topic, this is the default state) means you get notified of direct replies, @yourname mentions and quotes, but not all replies to the topic.

PJH

@Maciejasjmj said:

with your email name as an username

Nasty....

darkmatter

@Maciejasjmj said:

immediately creates an account for you with your email name as an username and logs you in once you click the link.

Sweet, because users wanting to post anonymously totally deserve to have their email address displayed on their post so we can track them down and murder them for breaking the laws of the Discoursiverse.

end

This is a system of inviting friends with "one click" onboarding that become permanently attached to your account, on the "invites" tab; it was never intended as a generic way for people to post using email.

Crunger

This post is deleted!

Crunger

@sam said:

Technically I am struggling to figure out how this is feasible without poisoning the user database.

What if you made the anon-de-plume be an attribute of the posting, without touching the user database?

Or better yet, take the TDWTF approach and change the poster field to be an XML stream that can have several attributes, including the nom-de-plume and/or the foreign key to the posters table.

end

@c__ said:

By the way, i don't mean actual pagination. Just some floatie telling me something to the effect of "you're now reading posts that would have been on the 2nd page". Some infiniscroll blogs do that, IIRC.

For those of you interested in the pagination strategeries, feel free to weigh in here:

Jun 12, 2014

Natural breakpoints or "chapters" for long topics?

One thing we’re thinking about is how to determine natural breakpoints or “chapters” for long discussion topics – and we can eventually display these breakpoints as navigation selections on the expanded topic progress bar. Say you have a 500+ post topic that you want to explore. How do you do...

tufty

I'd comment there, but it would mean setting up an account, with all the faff that entails. So, if you'll forgive me, I have to comment here. Bear in mind that I'm largely opposed to infinite scrolling, and 100% opposed to the bugged implementation implied by current technology; something has to be done.

Option 0 - Arbitrary page based navigation

It's far from perfect, but it has a couple of advantages:

Pages are of a "fixed" size of n posts, and the user can choose what size of chunk they want
Directly mirrors the page structure of a book or pamphlet, where there is no intrinsic meaning implied by page number except that page number n+1 comes after page number n.

Option 1 - Activity-based "chapters"

It's an interesting idea, and in certain cases it might work. The problems I can see with that are:

Threads don't progress at the same rate, one thread's "dead" time could well be another thread's "full speed". Indeed, the same goes for progress within a thread itself.
Assuming you can somehow meaningfully break the thread down into chunks, those chunks won't be of the same size, qualitatively or quantitatively. So when I somehow select "period x" I don't know if I'm gonna get 5 brilliant posts, 5 brillant posts, or 500 one-liners.
You're trying to imply some sort of meaning (chapters) to something which is based on elapsed time.

Option 2 - time-based paging.

No better than option 0, and loses the fixed size advantage.

Option 3 - significant event chapters

Might work, if you can make a workable algorithm, but doesn't allow for a thread "waking up" and going back in time. For example, a thread goes "dead" for a bit, and then an event happens which causes someone to post a quick "one liner", which pulls th thread back to the top of the list, people remember it, and the things they meant to post but never got around to. This happens fairly regularly in forums and newsgroups, and you'd be marking the "one liner" as an event triggering potentially large numbers of unrelated "stuff". Your algorithm is going to be hard to write. Here's a hint - your thread summary algorithm is worthless.

Given that you're for some reason religiously opposed to the simplest option, I'd tend to suggest working on improving the "threaded" view provided by tin/trn/gnus/most email clients, which not only provides a direct way of following the conversation, but also "maps" the discussion.

tufty

So, after a little cogitation whilst cutting the grass, a few more more-or-less related thoughts.

I really, really, really don't like infinite scrolling as a way of reading a thread, even if you could somehow make it magically work "properly" without having to reimplement half a browser in a half-assed way using javascript to do it (and still end up with a totally WTF solution). It's also extremely "faddy" and I suspect that once the newness and coolness of "infinite scrolling is ther besterest" appeal of slapping it everywhere has gone away your product is going to look very dated.

That said, as a way of navigating a thread list, however, it's great. Right tools for the right jobs and all that.

Now, you are opposed to "traditional" or "dumb" paging for reading, and as far as I can tell, that's because it adds no semantic information. I can totally get on board with that. However, as far as I can tell, infinite scrolling doesn't do any better in that respect. Indeed, once you get to a longer thread, it's an active hindrance to reading, at least for me. See also Lorne's posts regarding the "wall of text" aspect, and, of course, ignore the irony that this post is becoming an unreadable wall of text itself...

So, what would be better in semantic terms than paging, and more readable than infinite scrolling?

My absolute criteria would be:

You absolutely must not break the browser's OS integration. Any current browser's OS integration. The scrollbar must work as expected, integrated search must work as expected, back button must work as expected without shitting over history ... <expand list as required to cover all the other subtle ways in which Discourse currently breaks the browser>
The view of a single thread or part of it must be digestible.
How the thread is split must be easily understandable by the person reading.
You've gotta provide some easy way of distinguishing what's been read from what's not been read.
You absolutely must cater for those who are using screenreaders and the like.

There's also a few very nice to haves:

It should work functionally on all current browsers and most past ones. That means (largely) making the googlebot view functional enough that those with (for example) low-bandwidth phone connections to use without eating their bandwidth quota.
It should work functionally on low-powered devices. The future appears to be aiming for "more from less", and a website shouldn't thrash something like my development box.
For the love of god, it should work without Javascript. Remember the web when it was all goddamned flash? That's what Javascript is becoming. A good deign ethic is "If it doesn't work with Lynx, it's doesn't work period".

So, what metadata do you have?

You have the "posted in reply to" information; that gives you a tree structure. You also have "quoted text from this post" information, which pulls the tree into a crosslinked webby sort of thing. You have authors, from which it would be possible to identify (possibly) back-and-forth arguments, stuff being expounded upon by people I like, and so on (although I'm personally of the opinion that stuff like "friend / enemy" lists merely encourage confirmation bias). Like counts, and information on who liked what. And, finally, you have the words themselves, from which you could potentially extract some sort of "tag cloud".

As an aside, for keeping stuff ontopic, the "+ Reply" and current implementation of "⤺ Reply" buttons are your worst enemy. The first generates a context-free reply to "the thread" rather than any particular post, but places it under the first comment, and the second doesn't go to the lengths of quoting the text; I can hit any one and type random shit with no cognitive dissonnance, if there was quoted text like on every forum software everywhere forever, it might make me think a bit if I really meant to do what I just did.

Maybe more later.

ender

How about implementing paging like this: keep traditional pages with n posts per page, but when you reach the last post on current page, automatically load the next page's posts, and remove current page's posts (except for those that are still visible on screen). Keep the pagenumber indicator somewhere, and when previous page's posts are removed, they should be removed from DOM, so that the scrollbar jumps back to the top.

Zecc

This has been suggested at least twice already.

Arantor

And it would work, too, provided that it didn't require just loading the entire next page via an iframe and then transplanted the content like one forum system I know does. Though the dev may have stopped doing that now (but I doubt it, it was the most efficient way to deal with the inline minified JS event handling he did)

mikeTheLiar

Our reputation precedes us, I see.

Arantor

And so it should. This community is awesome and I feel humbled to be a little tiny part of it.

tufty

This post is deleted!