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Journal by FakeBeldin
I was just modding. After setting a few mods, scrolling down further, I figured I'd probably run out of mod points.
So I pressed "end" to get to the moderate button at the bottom of the page. Unfortunately, I was still in a mod-selection box.
Took me a bit to find back which mod-box. Turned out to be pointing to "spam" thanks to pressing the END button.
Suggestion: to avoid accidents like this, maybe it'd be an idea to have the top and bottom mods be something else than spam?
(e.g. top + bottom both "normal" would just undo any changes for people who press home or end. And probably also for anyone pressing pgup or pgdown.)
moving "spam" in list to avoid accidental spam mod
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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.
Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected.
-- Spock, "The Squire of Gothos", stardate 2124.5
(Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday January 13 2016, @08:24PM
I understand the frustration you expressed as I have encountered the same problem myself.
The problem arises because both keyboard and mouse navigation is provided to manipulate the control. I seem to recall this control being introduced around the time frame of Windows for Workgroups — it might have been earlier, but I am certain that it was available in Windows 95.
The control in question is called a drop down list [microsoft.com]. The descriptions for them are available (dead tree format) in The Windows Interface Guidelines for Software Design [microsoft.com], pages 152-153. For an on-line copy, see: http://www.qatest.com/UI/Controls/ListBox.html [qatest.com]
These are burned into my brain because I performed QA on a number of applications back in that day and had to make sure that the UI was consistent and adhered to these guidelines. I had seen then, and am starting to see again, applications moving to mystery meat navigation [wikipedia.org] and would prefer to not see this site fall prey to being an entry on Web Pages That Suck [webpagesthatsuck.com].
The gist of the problem is this: as soon as you place focus on the list box, the cursor navigation keys (UP ARROW, DOWN ARROW, LEFT ARROW, RIGHT ARROW, HOME, END, PAGE UP, and PAGE DOWN) serve to choose *among* the listed items. AND, they will continue to do so until you change the focus on that page. This is the defined behavior for the control.
For reference, here are currently-available choices as laid out (for the first comment to this journal entry) in the source of the page:
Adding another "Normal" entry at the end (or another 'dashes' choice) would only serve to handle the specific case of pressing END (or CTRL+END) while focus was still in the drop-down list box. One could then reasonably argue that it does nothing for the case where, after selecting a moderation, the user presses one of the cursor navigation keys: UP ARROW, DOWN ARROW, LEFT ARROW, or RIGHT ARROW. What would you do, then? Ask for a dashed line between every single choice?
What is being requested here is contrary to the *specified* behavior of the control.
The correct *user* action is, after making one's selection, move the focus to some other part of the page. (e.g. Press TAB or click on some other part of the page.)
As much as I would like to see some other solution to the situation, I cannot see a way to do so without causing a known interface element to exhibit unusual activity — that runs afoul of the Principle of Least Astonishment [wikipedia.org].
P.S. I believe all of the 'Moderation' buttons on a page are equivalent; there was no need to press PAGE DOWN to get to the bottom-most Moderation button. Clicking the Moderation button adjacent to the moderation choice would have performed the exact same action.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 14 2016, @01:54PM
Just adding
after the spam mod would most easily solve the problem. Of course your original moderation selection would still be gone, but that's unavoidable anyway.
An advanced solution would additionally have Rehash notice the unusual (and certainly not intended) selection, and give a warning message on the resulting page ("warning: your moderation on comment #xxx was invalid"). But that would of course need actual programming effort, as opposed to simply extending the list by another non-option.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday January 15 2016, @05:13PM
Your suggestion was already mentioned in the comment that you replied to. Further, that comment noted how it was an insufficient solution as it *only* addressed the *single* case of pressing END (or CTRL+END or PAGE DOWN) when focus was on the moderation control. Further that comment noted how all of the other keyboard navigation keys would still be operative and this suggested solution would do nothing to address those cases.
Still further, the problem, such as it is, is endemic to the nature of the control — it is *intended* to allow the use of the keyboard to select among the choices.
The solution is to move the keyboard focus away from the drop-down list box prior to using any keyboard navigation keys. This can be accomplished in two ways:
1.) For keyboard manipulation, press TAB (or SHIFT+TAB) to move to the next (prior) control on the page.
2.) For mouse manipulation, click on some other part of the page.
An alternative approach is to open the comment you wish to moderate by itself: in the case of your comment, click on the #289481 [soylentnews.org] which appears in the header of the comment. Many (most?) browsers allow you to request it be opened in its own tab or window.
Then, on *that* page, perform the desired moderation.
Lastly, close that tab or window, and return to the full comment page.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Saturday January 16 2016, @04:08PM
The Spam moderation is special (that's already signified by the dashed line before it). It deserves extra protection (actually I'd prefer an extra confirmation page asking "Did you really want to moderate this post "Spam" — appearing only for spam moderation — but that would probably need a disproportional amount of programming).
I also don't subscribe to the attitude "we cannot make it perfect, therefore we don't improve it". Nor do I subscribe to the philosophy "if users frequently make a certain error, it's still completely the fault of the user; let's not help the user with it."
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.