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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

 
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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 The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:56PM (8 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:56PM (#473098) Homepage Journal

    Are you by chance reading in Flat mode? Because single comment requests in Flat mode is what I'm on at the moment.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:30PM (7 children)

    by aristarchus (2645) on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:30PM (#473114) Journal

    Why, yes, O Buzzard of Might! How prescient of you! I will try to move on from Flatland to have some points.

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:21AM (6 children)

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:21AM (#473140) Homepage Journal

      I have no idea what the points thing is. That's just a script that runs once a day and sets the points column of the users table to 5 if your member-since date is over 30 days in the past. Has nothing to do with the web coding. Speaking of, it should have just run a few minutes ago.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday March 01 2017, @06:55AM (5 children)

        by aristarchus (2645) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @06:55AM (#473229) Journal

        Is my clock off? Alright. As of a few hours ago, well past the UTC reset for mod points, my magazine had 3 points. I do not recall having been logged in or using mod points since the designated refresh. I used one of them to upgrade a comment, just to test. Went down to 2 remaining. So far, so good. But now, some few plus a few more, I have my full load of 5 mod points! Not that I want to use them to downmod jmorris or anything, but this is not normal behavior.

        Yesterday, my ranking dropped four points, and then later came back up, with no apparent changes in mods to my posts. And then it came back up, again with no relevant changes. I am puzzled! But then, that is normal for a philosopher, even one 2400 years old.

        Messages about replies still throw an internal server error. But only recent ones, it seems? Sorry to not be more help.

        • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday March 01 2017, @08:16AM (4 children)

          by aristarchus (2645) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @08:16AM (#473239) Journal

          Get same "internal server error" when clicking on "parent" to a post. Hmmm. Is it just me?

          • (Score: 2) by paulej72 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @11:57AM (3 children)

            by paulej72 (58) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @11:57AM (#473267) Journal

            if you are using Flat mode, you will for now. We got the bug mostly fixed, but need some more time to get it working properly, and then we need to test to make sure it still works for older stories.

            --
            Team Leader for SN Development
            • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:06PM

              by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:06PM (#473280) Homepage Journal

              No worries on older stories. They still have to use the old, slow mode because they don't have the children or opid columns populated.

              --
              My rights don't end where your fear begins.
            • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday March 02 2017, @02:27AM (1 child)

              by aristarchus (2645) on Thursday March 02 2017, @02:27AM (#473681) Journal

              Seems to be fixed! Good job, dev team(s)!

              • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday March 02 2017, @05:18AM

                by aristarchus (2645) on Thursday March 02 2017, @05:18AM (#473749) Journal

                Oh, and now (when did this happen? Not UTC 00:10!) I have mod points. As Alice said, "Curiouser and curiouser!"