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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
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Tuesday February 28 2017, @08:49PM (2 children)
Preface: As always I want to recognize that the admins are doing great things with only the sweat of their virtual brows to show for it. I thank you all for the time you put in.
A lot of the things I immediately hated about the update were rapidly fixed. Some others were acknowledged, but haven't yet been fixed. Some things I fear may become permanent, which gives me a great deal of stress at the moment. I'm trying to be patient, and trying to accurately lay out what issues remain.
The "Comment Below Threshold" is still in bold, which looks very awkward. I think paulej72 has acknowledged and will fix this when he has the time.
There are still a significant number of differences between the info displayed for collapsed comments now versus before. Username (4557) posted a good screenshot that shows many of them.
Link: http://oi67.tinypic.com/2cgo6zd.jpg [tinypic.com]
- Subject of a collapsed comment is no longer a link. It used to be. I liked that. Others liked it. I even used it a few times.
- The light vertical lines that helped visually connect parent posts with different layers of child posts have disappeared. The collapsed child posts can now tend to look kind of lost in empty space.
- Collapsed comment is now [ Subject (Score: N) by Author ] rather than [ Subject by Author (Score: N) ]. This is quite awkward to read, and the latter (earlier) form mimics the way the (Score: N) is at the end of the subject line in the red header bar. I would really like this to return to the way it was.
- UIDs are still being displayed in the collapsed comments. Why? This is an unnecessary detail that can be discovered by expanding the comment.
- Collapsed comments no longer show day/date/time as they used to. I would like that info to return if possible. Except instead of full length days and dates like [ Saturday February 26 2015 @12:4AM ], why not think about using a more compacted (and more consistent in length and more readable) format such as [ Sat 26 Feb 2015 @12:4AM ].
I saw this bug the last time I laid all this out in another comment: When I type [ @ 1 2 :3 4 A M ] like I did above and then preview my post, I see [ @ 1 2 :4 A M ]. The site seems to be eating the character immediately after the colon. The spaces in this example were just to try and avoid triggering the bug, but it's actually still there. In this example the bug is eating the space character after the colon when I preview the post.
I know how to disable comment dimming, and I know about the setting to mark new posts with [ *NEW* ]. I will still argue that the dimming is a flawed idea that should die. Surely there is a different way to mark new posts visually that will work even for the color blind and those who use other themes. The dimming is done through the use of opacity modification which also modifies the text opacity. So even with a very delicate adjustment in opacity, it ends up making the user feel like there is something wrong with their display (or worse, their eyes). By the time you've toned down the opacity change to the point where it isn't jarring, you've reached a point where it's nearly impossible to tell the difference between new and old posts. And that's for someone who isn't color blind. So ultimately, what's the point? There has to be a way to use CSS to insert a simple visual marker of some kind in "new" posts that will work even for color blind users without being obnoxious. What about making a CSS border one pixel thicker on new posts, or something similar? Or make the font in the red bar one size larger.
The chevrons are still far less attractive and more awkward to use than the lovely plus/plusplus/minusminus boxes. I'm experimenting with changing the view style to work around the awkwardness of how the chevrons function, but I'm not happy yet.
The auto-expanding spoiler tag that moves everything around? Yeah, have to give that two thumbs down, Siskel & Ebert style. This isn't IMDB.
I think I do kind of like how the (Score: N) is in a reduced font size compared to the subject. I like that it's subtle and not overdone.
Everything that was horribly wrong with the red and gray bar contents initially was entirely fixed early on. Hurrah!
Many thanks to all admins especially the attentive TMB and paulej72.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:58PM
That's fixed in the repo already, it just hasn't been pushed live yet.
You're quite entitled to that opinion. Mine is that it's the best thing since sliced bread for quickly being able to spot new posts. It's a good thing that we can both have our wishes accommodated.
Adjusting the *NEW* functionality to also increase the RGB values (affecting brightness not hue, so colorblind people will be able to see it just peachy) of the subject bar a bit is on the slate but it will take tweaking every single theme to do.
For that matter, everything else you mentioned is on the slate to be tweaked or entirely redone. It's the work week though so time is less available for paulej72 than on the weekends. Me, I just took a day off after a week and a half of coding 6-12 hours every day so my brain wouldn't explode. We're good but we aren't quite miracle workers. We'll get things sorted eventually.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:15AM
The Comment Below Threshold issue should now be fixed. All of you other will be taken into consideration. I expect many of them will be implemented.
Getting the title of the comment to toggle to collapsed state may be a bit harder to make happen as it would need to be tied to the element that toggles the CSS to change. This is currently a label tided to a hidden checkbox. The title and the control might need to be next to each other for this to happen.
Team Leader for SN Development