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posted by martyb on Tuesday February 28 2017, @05:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the reset-button dept.

Hi there. Martyb again with an update of our progress on issues arising from the site update. (The new comment grouping and display code was necessitated by huge server loads as well as long delays on constructing and returning highly-commented articles.)

First off, please accept my sincere thanks to all of you who made the time to comment in the prior stories and/or engaged us on the #dev channel on IRC. Really! Thank you for your passion and willingness to provide steps to reproduce and ideas for overcoming the issues that have been found.

ACs: If you access the site as an Anonymous Coward, be aware that we have NOT forgotten you. We are still trying to ascertain what features work best for the most people and are holding off changing (and rechanging and...) settings until we have a better idea of what to change those settings to be. So, please speak up on anything that you continue to find problematic and help guide us to making a choice that works the best for the most.

Scrolling Within a Comment: From what I saw in the reports from Monday, one of the key issues had to do with the scrolling within comments. We heard you. Oh, did we ever! Scrolling within comments was quickly removed and replaced by setting a limit on how long a comment could be submitted. This was especially problematic on mobiles and tablets.

Display Modes: Another of the often discussed issues had to do with "Display Mode." This can be set in your preferences (for logged-in users) and ad hoc when you load a story.

Display Mode - Defaults: If, prior to the release you had chosen "Flat", then you were transitioned to "Flat" (Doh!) If you had anything else as your selection for "Display Mode", you were transitioned to "Threaded-TOS". That mode was intended, as best as we were able to do using only CSS, to replicate the behavior previously supported by the old "Threaded" mode. You CAN change this. Many have reported that changing "Threaded-TOS" to "Threaded-TNG" and setting a lower value for "Breakthrough" (in this mode, "Threshold" is ignored) seemed to do the trick.

Display Mode - ad hoc setting: For the ad hoc case, just load the story as you normally would. Below the actual story text and before the comments is a set of controls. If you are having issues with the current default of "Threaded-TOS" click on that text and change it to "Threaded-TNG". if you find you have way too many icons to click in order to read comments, choose a smaller value for Breakthrough (-1 displays all; in this mode Threshold value is ignored).

Spoiler: Another popular topic of discussion was the way the new <spoiler> tag was implemented. We've heard you, but have not as yet decided on a course of action on how to update its functionality... Stay tuned!

*NEW* and/or Dimming: A surprising (to me at least) number of folks had issues with how we flagged old/new comments. For logged-in users, again go to the "Comments" tab of your "preferences" page, scroll down a little, and there are checkboxes that you can toggle:

Highlight New Comments [ ] Highlight new comments with *NEW* tag
Dim Read Comments [ ] Dim already read comments

Please give those a try and see if that works for you. Our first implementation of "Dimming" was a bit too strong for most folk's liking - this has been reduced so as to be less jarring. As for the "*NEW*" text, there were several positive comments that on mobile devices especially, one could quickly search for the text and rapidly navigate comments to find out what was new. There was a suggestion that uppercase-only looks like YELLING. Yes, it does. On the other hand, whatever text is selected for display has to be a reasonably unlikely string to appear in the normal course of reading comments. (False positives, anyone?)

There were some suggestions on changing the color of the comment title to flag it as new. This sounds pretty simple, but the devil is in the details. We have some in our community who are color-blind and others who have very limited vision, if any at all. For them, any color changes could be well nigh invisible. But it gets worse. On the "Homepage" tab of the "Preferences" page, there are currently 11 different themes that one can choose as your default. Setting a new comment to have a lighter (or darker) title bar would not work across all of those disparate themes.

Chevrons: And as for those chevrons that control the display of a single comment and of a comment tree, yes we heard you. Work is underway to see if we can replace those images with single/double plus/minus characters.

Penultimately, I would like to add a call-out to Paulej72 who took point yesterday (giving TheMightyBuzzard a well-deserved respite) and worked tirelessly into the night to address the issues that were raised.

Lastly, again many thanks to you, our community, who have guided us through this transition. Your feedback matters. We listen and for those who have been following along, I hope you can see the changes and the progress. We continue to strive to earn your trust and support. Thank you!

Dev Note: Currently there is an issue with Flat mode and viewing single comments such as https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=18223&cid=472653. It just came to our attention and we will be working on it to fix it. This issue will cause you to get a server error. Workarounds are to either switch modes to anything other than Flat or avoid going to single comment views.

Continuation of:
Site Update 17_2
Comments Redux

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:23PM (12 children)

    by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:23PM (#472976) Journal

    On the old site, after I posted a comment I would be taken to a page that showed my comment, with the story above. By reloading that page, I could readily see whether anyone had replied. On the new site, I'm taken to a page that has the story and everyone's comments. I can, of course, search within the page for my own and, having found it, click on its number to get to the page about it. That takes a little bit more effort, though.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:31PM (3 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:31PM (#472982)

    It takes me to the offset my new comment on the story page.
    Clicking the comment number there, gets you back to that comment-specific page.

    I prefer to be back to the story, it saves me the extra click. Change approved!

    Inline commenting would be even better (still could scroll to read/copy/paste from the whole thread), but I like the incremental improvement.

    • (Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday February 28 2017, @08:51PM (2 children)

      by DECbot (832) on Tuesday February 28 2017, @08:51PM (#473031) Journal

      I tend to fall in the "No Javascript" crowd, but I'd think the inline comment would be a great feature for those who feel secure in their JS environment setup and the new page a great backup function for when JS is disabled. Sites that cannot run without JS I feel are broken, but light use of JS for design or function purposes are nice. That said, heavy JS use with unfettered JS/Flash access for advertisers and CDNs and other third/fourth/fifth parties is not acceptable website design.

      --
      cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
      • (Score: 2) by paulej72 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:55AM (1 child)

        by paulej72 (58) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:55AM (#473171) Journal

        But commenting is not a light use of JS as it needs to send and receive data from the server. This means ajax or soap or some other stuff to send the data back and forth.

        I just deployed a fix for the redirects that will bring you back to your comment when you are not on page 1. The page var was not getting passed through the posting process properly.

        I hope this helps.

        --
        Team Leader for SN Development
        • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:51PM

          by Pino P (4721) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:51PM (#473383) Journal

          Could "Reply to This" open the comment form in an iframe inside the existing page?

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:53PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:53PM (#472995) Journal

    Like bob said, it should take you right to the comment you just made. Maybe just make a rapid middle-click on the #472976 link, and then continue reading other comments on the story. Then close that tab and leave the other one open.

    This behavior might be a good place for a new user setting [soylentnews.org], however.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 28 2017, @08:06PM (2 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 28 2017, @08:06PM (#473002)

    On the new site, I'm taken to a page that has the story and everyone's comments. I can, of course, search within the page for my own and, having found it, click on its number to get to the page about it.

    This is an inconsistency in the new design that goes beyond mere stylistic issues.

    I disabled dimming of "read" posts because even in my shit-post-iest moments I do the others the honor of re-reading the entire thread before diving in and writing something to be as on topic and well placed as possible. In the unlikely event its not a good post, at least it wasn't for lack of trying. I figure if thousands have to read what I post, I have the obligation to at least (re)read a couple posts to keep things on track, make it more worth reading than if I just jumped in talking without listening.

    So that's an inconsistency in the new design, in that its good that you get encouraged to re-read the gist of the discussion via scroll placement, but the new design should also by default not dim, because not dimming also encourages re-read via not screwing up contrast.

    In summary I think better posts come from (re)reading more posts and the new design is somewhat inconsistent about that overall goal.

    Although if the worst thing I can find to complain about is I toggled exactly one default setting, well, that's a pretty successful redesign overall.

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:24PM (1 child)

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:24PM (#473112) Homepage Journal

      That's not an inconsistency if you're not taken back to your comment in the entire page of comments, it's a bug. When you comment it should always take you to the comment you just made.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:08PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:08PM (#473320)

        Huh I very specifically tried to reproduce my poor bug report and failed. File it as unreproducible. Maybe someone was messin with it while I was messin with it originally. Could be just bad luck.

  • (Score: 2) by paulej72 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:57AM

    by paulej72 (58) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:57AM (#473172) Journal

    There was a bug, that is now fixed, where if you posted on any page > 1 you would not be sent to your new comment.

    I hope this remedies your issues.

    --
    Team Leader for SN Development
  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:33PM (2 children)

    by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:33PM (#473311) Journal

    This doesn't scale well to many comments, but fortunately you get an async notification in the message centre for replies. Unfortunately, the UI there is a pain and doesn't make it easy to tell the difference between replies to different posts in the same thread without opening them all in new tabs and closing the redundant ones.

    Going back to the main story is a massive waste of bandwidth for me, because (in the absence of in-page commenting) I don't want to lose my place when I comment so I always open the comment window in a new tab. At the end, I then have two pages open pointing to the same page, so I close one. Worse, the new one marks all of the new comments above where I was reading as read, so I don't get any benefit from the ugly '*NEW*' annotations everywhere, because a bunch of new comments are tracked as old as a result of this misfeature.

    --
    sudo mod me up
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:36PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:36PM (#473335)

      Worse, the new one marks all of the new comments above where I was reading as read, so I don't get any benefit from the ugly '*NEW*' annotations everywhere, because a bunch of new comments are tracked as old as a result of this misfeature.

      Check carefully, because that doesn't sound likely.

      1st, that would be a bug, as we were told (in the 1st article about the comment changes, IIRC) that posting comments would not affect the *NEW*/fading behavior. (Is there a "noupdate=1" parameter in the URL after you comment?)

      2nd, since the *NEW*/fading are controlled by a single comment ID, with all older comments faded and all newer comments *NEW*ed (subject to settings, of course), I can't see how such a bug could only affect comments above where you were reading.

    • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:24PM

      by butthurt (6141) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:24PM (#473362) Journal

      > [...] you get an async notification in the message centre for replies.

      Yes, except when commenting anonymously.