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posted by martyb on Thursday March 02 2017, @03:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the gasping-for-air dept.

Martyb here once again with today's update on our site's update. I apologize that this is not as well written as my prior updates as exhaustion and outside issues are demanding of my time. I ask you to please bear with me.

Quick Recap: As you may recall, our servers were getting melted trying to serve up highly-commented stories. Further, this made for an unacceptably long delay between the time one would request a story and when it would finally get returned for display. Our devs have implemented alternative display modes, "Threaded-TOS" and "Threaded-TNG" which use a much more efficient means of processing comments and getting them to you. These changes went "live" on Saturday, February 25.

Like anything new, we expected there would be issues. We very much appreciate your patience as we tried to work through these as they were reported. And did you ever let us know!

Paulej72 (aka PJ) and TheMightyBuzzard (TMB) have been laboring mightily to keep up with the issues that have been reported as well as a few they found independently. Similarly, as their fixes have gone live, our community has had to deal with a changing landscape of "what happens when I do this?" To add to this, comments being such a major part of the site's purpose, there are "knobs" in several places where users can customize which comments are presented to them and how they appear. The permutations are many and wide-raging. As bug fixes have been made, the impact of changing these has had different effects over time.

I've been astounded at how much the community has been supportive of our efforts, how well problems have been described and isolated, and how quickly the devs have been able to fix bugs as they have been noted. Even more impressive was the discussion in our last update story on possible alternative means of implementing the <spoiler> tag. I'm proud to be part of this community — you rock!

Stories: While all this activity has been happening, stories have still been posted to our site for your reading and commenting pleasure. We are working with a reduced editorial staff at the moment. Us long-timers have been posting as we can, but I would like to personally thanks our new editors fnord666 and charon for their heroic efforts getting stories posted, and takyon for his continued efforts at providing well-written stories. I have noticed submissions from new folks as well, and the heartens me immensely! (Note: I hesitate to call out people in particular for fear I will overlook someone; any omission is purely my fault and I would appreciate being called out on it if I have failed to list your contribution.)

Plans: This development blitz has, however, come at a cost. For those who were with this site at its inception, there was a "day of rest" imposed on the developers who had worked basically non-stop trying to get our site up and somewhat stable. I have suggested a similar break to our dev staff. Recall we are all volunteers doing this in our spare time. PJ has plans coming up and will be unavailable on Friday and Saturday. From what I've seen, TMB is well nigh a crispy critter at this point and most certainly needs a break. And, quite frankly, I've put a lot of personal stuff on hold while working on this update and could use a break, as well. In short, we are tired.

So, PJ is around for a bit (in his free time while at work) for today and TMB is getting a well-deserved breather. NCommander is nearing burnout has been tied up with an outside project that demands his full attention and has been unable to help much. I'll poke in from time to time, but I really need some time off, too.

What I ask from the community is that we do something similar. Step back for a moment. Look at the forest and not just the trees. Play around with the different display Modes. Try setting a different "Breakthrough" and/or "Threshold". Things should be much more stable today, so that will make it easier to gain a "mental model" of what does what.

The other thing I would ask is for the community to pull together and try to address issues together. Someone posts an issue about struggling with having to click on all the little chevrons? Inquire about their user preference settings, and suggest a different value for Threshold/Breakthrough. My sense is that some are more adept at using the new features and they can help others to get a better understanding of how things work. With those issues addressed, we can more clearly identify and isolate underlying problems and focus our energies more productively.

tl;dr We're not done yet, we truly appreciate your patience and forbearance during this transition, we need a break, and you guys rock in helping others in the community understand and use the new stuff. As always, keep our toes to the fire — we are here for you — let us catch our breath and we'll be better able to move forward.

Continuation of:
Site Update 17_2
Comments Redux
Site Update: The Next Episode
Site Update - We're Getting There!

Related Stories

Site Update 17_2 193 comments

Okay, I know it's been a long time since we did one of these but life does intrude on volunteer dev time. Hopefully this one will be worth the wait. Bear with me if I seem a bit off today, I'm writing this with a really fun head cold.

First, what didn't make it into this update but is directly upcoming. Bitpay is still down on account of them changing the API without notifying existing customers or versioning the new API and leaving the old one still up and functional. It's the first thing I'm going to work on after we get this update rolled out but it will basically require a complete rewrite. Don't expect it any earlier than two months from now because we like to test the complete hell out of any code that deals with your money.

Also, adding a Jobs nexus didn't quite make the cut because we're not entirely sure how/if we want to work it. One thing we are certain about, it would not be for headhunters or HR drones to spam us silly but for registered members who have a specific vacancy they need to fill and would like to throw it open to the community.

The API still has some broken bits but it's been low priority compared to what I've been busy with. I'm thinking I'll jump on it after Bitpay unless paulej72 cracks the whip and makes me fix bugs/implement features instead.

There were several other things that I had lined up for post-Bitpay but I can't remember them just now what with my head feeling like it's stuffed full of dirty gym socks.

Now let's throw the list of what did make it out there and go over it in more detail afterwards.

  • Tweaked the themes a bit where they were off.
  • Changed or fixed some adminy/editory stuff that most of you will never see or care about.
  • Fixed a mess of minor bugs not worth noting individually.
  • Improved Rehash installation. It should almost be possible to just follow directions and have a site working in an hour or two now.
  • Added a very restrictive Content Security Policy.
  • Added a link to the Hall of Fame. It was always there, just not linked to.
  • Return to where you just moderated after moderating. (yay!)
  • Return to where you just were after commenting. (yay some more!)
  • Added a field for department on submissions. Editors get final say but if you have a good one, go for it.
  • Added a Community Reviews nexus.
  • Added a Politics nexus.
  • Added <spoiler> tags for the Reviews nexus in case you want to talk about a novel without ruining it for everyone else. They function everywhere though.
  • Changed really freaking long comments to have a scrollbar now instead of being click-to-show.
  • Massively sped up comment rendering on heavily commented stories.
  • Dimming of comments you've already read. (You can turn this off with the controls on the "Comments" tab of your preferences page if it annoys you.)
  • Added a "*NEW*" badge to new comments in case you don't like dimming but still want to easily see new posts. (Disable it the same place as above.)
  • Removed Nested, Threaded, and Improved threaded comment rendering modes (Necessary due to the changes required for the massive speed-up)
  • Added Threaded-TOS and Threaded-TNG comment rendering modes. (TOS is the default)
  • All comment modes now feature collapsible/expandable comments. (Without javascript)

Morning Update: Really digging the constructive criticism. Some quality thoughts in there. Keep them coming and we'll see how fast we can get a few done. --TMB


Comments Redux 113 comments

Continuation of: Site Update 2/27

So, the recent site update got a lot of news, and comments. Predictably, there was a lot of comments split on the fence both ways. I've been out sick and haven't been actively involved in SN in a few days, but I did review the updated changes on dev before they went out. I'm still not up to responding to you guys personally, and TMB/Paul have had things covered, so I'm just going to write a blanket story. So, let's open this and say THIS ISN'T THE FINAL SET OF HOW THINGS WILL BE. I'm leaving my comments above the fold to make it clear what's going on. I'd put that in a blink tag on if that was still in the HTML standard.

The changes to commenting were primarily driven on technical grounds. To do D1.5, the site had to load a mass load of comments and do server side processing to thread them. To give you an example, on a cold page load, before we apply caching a few points in the site would take over a minute to load, render and thread. The only thing that prevented the site from becoming unusable in 503s is that the frontend has a lot of caching. Even with that, we can't cache every single bit of the site at once. In a "cold cache" scenario such as after a varnish or DB update, the site would be borderline unusable until those caches could be loaded. So let me make this clear that this change wasn't a change for changes sake. There was (and is) a need to revamp the commenting.

We noted that this change was coming in other meta stories, and even had a landing article on dev for people coming to check it out. No one did. How we use commenting on dev and how we use it on production are two different things; you can't realistically test these things in real world conditions without updating production.

As TMB stated, we couldn't get the same behavior without making the site cry in the corner, and this was fairly extensively tested on dev before it went live. For older users to the site, you may remember this is not the first time we've changed comments, and rather predictably, the roll out of Improved Commenting actually was fairly buggy. This is a more drastic update.

Right now, we're going to keep improving and changing things to address as many things as possible. To that extent, there will be a daily article for at least this week if not longer to allow for feedback as we work to make things better. If, at the end of all the tweaking, we can't satisfy the vast majority of folks, a revert remains as an available option. We've built this entire site on listening to the community, and taking their feedback into account. That isn't going to change now. I'm hoping we've earned enough trust from you guys collectively to be allowed to at least experiment for a bit.

I'm going to leave the rest of the article for the dev crew to use. Due to personal real life issues, I'm likely not going to be around much, so if you don't see me, that's why. I have full faith in the staff in helping manage and keep things going.

~ NCommander

Hi! I'm martyb (aka Bytram) your friendly neighborhood QA/test guy chiming in with my 2¢ on the upgrade/rollout.

Firstly, I apologize that you are seeing ANY issues with the site upgrade. I took this update very seriously and was, unfortunately, only able to perform about half of the testing that I wanted to see done before we went live. That said, there are some issues that were reported that I had not foreseen, so this has been a learning experience for me, too.

Secondly, I'd like to point out what you are NOT seeing -- the many MANY changes that TMB and PJ made as a result of feedback arising from testing. That said, comments are THE thing that makes this site. It's not the timeliness or fine writing of the stories — as I see it, this site is all about providing a venue for discussion.

Look past the fold for the rest of my comments.

Site Update: The Next Episode 139 comments

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

Site Update - We're Getting There! 58 comments

Martyb here once again with an update on our progress with the site upgrade.

Our development team (paulej72, TheMightyBuzzard, and NCommander) have been hard at it trying to isolate and quash the bugs that have been reported. Having looked at some of the site source code (Perl) I can attest there are places where the comparison of Perl code to line noise is an apt description. Also, some of the code we inherited was written by, um, creative people who did not write the most readable code. Further the code documents what it does, but is just a wee bit short on the why. Translation: we have an amazing dev team here who have slogged many many hours trying to isolate and correct the issues that have arisen. If you've ever been bleary-eyed after a several-day coding sprint, you have an idea of things. I hereby express my personal thanks to the brain-numbing hard work these guys have put in for this site. And now on to where things stand.

We had an issue with getting a single comment to display correctly in "Flat" mode which appears to have been caused by issues with specifying the correct page it appeared in. Also, there was a rewrite of this code so things should be better, but watch out for regressions.

There are known issues with accessing the site via TOR most likely because we added a very restrictive Content Security Policy.

The new comment viewing modes "Threaded-TOS" and "Threaded-TNG" have been tweaked.

There is a strong voice to replicate the old "Threaded" behavior and it appears that may be feasible, now that we better understand how the community used it in the past. No promises, but it is being looked into.

We are close to making some changes for the defaults for Anonymous Cowards (non logged-in users), so if you have a preference, please speak up and make your voice known.

Oh, we have had reports of seemingly random 503 (Site Unavailable) errors. If you should experience one, please reply to this story with a description of what you were doing and a copy/paste of the entire error message. That will greatly help in our identifying, isolating, and hopefully fixing whatever gremlin is in the gears.

We have not forgotten about replacing chevrons with single/double plus/minus, but had some fires to put out that postponed action on these.

I expect I've left out a thing (or three) — please reply with a comment to (gently) remind us if you see a problem persisting, or if you find something new. it is most helpful to provide your user nickname, the date/time (and timezone), steps taken to cause the problem, and (ideally) suggestions on how you expected it to behave. Reports so far have for the most part been amazingly detailed and helpful — thanks!

Penultimately (I like that word!), I must express my sincere appreciation to the community who has been amazingly supportive and helpful in this transition. One benefit of the upgrade is you should see quicker page-load times on highly-commented stories. Our servers are experiencing a much lighter load to serve up those pages, too. Speaking of servers, I noticed that several of you have renewed your subscription to the site which is the primary way we can afford to keeps the lights on. Please accept my sincere and heart-felt thanks! The "Site News" slashbox has been updated to reflect our current situation.

Lastly, I must express my sincere gratitude to the community. I continue to be amazed at the breadth of knowledge that is freely shared here. Nary a day goes by that I don't learn something new. And many days when I am just blown away. Some long-held ideas have been challenged, and in some cases changed, thanks to what I've read here. Thank you!

Dev Note: Deployed a fix tonight for broken comment links that was due to yesterday's deploy. Alos deployed a partial fix for Flat comments and single comments. TMB will be working on getting it fixed up fully but I thought we needed what we had out now. -- paulej72

Continuation of:
Site Update 17_2
Comments Redux
Site Update: The Next Episode

17_02 Latest Bug Fixes: UPDATED 89 comments

So the Dev Team has been hard at work fixing up issues with with the 17_02 release. We compiled all of your comments from the 17_02 Meta stories into a large bug and feature request list. We have been working on getting these issues fixed as soon as we can.

You may have noticed some changes over the last week that went out to fix some issues, and we just released some more fixes today.

Here is a list of the major fixes since the last story:

  1. Comment titles now act to trigger actions as well as the buttons.
  2. New icons for the buttons that are bigger and spaced out a bit more.
  3. Removed extra spacing for some of the modes when buttons are hidden. (Still needs some more work, but much better than before.)
  4. Changed how we set states for hidden threads so that the individual comments are not set hidden as well. This will lessen the number of clicks needed to open a comment in this case.
  5. Flat comment mode will now show a comment's children when look at comment (cid is set).
  6. Temp fix for Content Security Policy eating CSS when not on https://soylentnews.org.
  7. Domain Tags now show in comments.
  8. Fixed broken messages when looking at them from messages.pl.
  9. Fixed for @user: shortcut links that would eat a character after the ":".

And here are the latest updates:

  1. Editor fixes: added new lines to story editor and fixed topic tree popup issue.
  2. Fix for black on black text boxes in Grayscale theme
  3. Added SVG icons for buttons and CSS fixes to enhance look.
  4. Mod Points now back to UTC 00:10.
  5. Add # of children to collapsed thread title.
  6. Fix comment details to bring in the correct data which broke email and journal links.
  7. Add time to collapsed comment title.
  8. Fix select all button in messages.pl.
  9. Redirect returns to correct article.pl page after moderating.
  10. Updated CSP to fix issues. We still need to search for some inline JS that may need to be purged or rewritten to work correctly.

Continuation of:
Site Update 17_2
Comments Redux
Site Update: The Next Episode
Site Update - Taking a Breather
Outstanding Issues

So if you see any new bugs that you think are related to these changes, or just want to let us know about an ongoing issue, please feel free to comment below.

Here are the currently known bugs that we are working on:

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.
(1)
  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday March 02 2017, @03:01PM (19 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday March 02 2017, @03:01PM (#473880) Journal

    If you have any feature requests or bug reports for my extension (link in sig), put them here.

    I am looking at:

    • Title button for journals
    • Correct cancellation of dialogs (like URL button)
    • Spoiler tag button
    • Change STRIKE to DEL
    • Dept. field handling in Save Draft feature
    • Possible Quote This enhancement
    • Possibly right-aligning the *NEW* text
    • Any bugs caused by new nexii
    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:18PM (7 children)

      by zocalo (302) on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:18PM (#473916)
      I think a right-aligned "*NEW*" would be more obvious, and might even make it possible to drop the all-caps since since that would add some additional emphasis even without the dimming of the old posts.
      --
      UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:22PM (6 children)

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:22PM (#473921) Journal

        Dimming on its own is already a killer feature in my book. It makes it super easy for my brain to spot the new posts while scrolling around (which I'd rather do than Ctrl+F).

        Changing *NEW* to *New* would be no trouble at all.

        --
        [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
        • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday March 02 2017, @06:21PM (5 children)

          by bob_super (1357) on Thursday March 02 2017, @06:21PM (#473978)

          Silly question: how much trouble is it to make the text "New" a user setting, down the road?
          Some people may want just a couple dashes, while others may believe they need "YouHaventReadThisOneYetDumbassGetOnIt" to avoid missing stuff.
          Definitely not a short-term need...

          • (Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday March 02 2017, @07:42PM (3 children)

            by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday March 02 2017, @07:42PM (#474047) Homepage Journal

            It's in the CSS, so we'd have to start dynamically generating that. I'd say a roughly moderate pain in the ass.

            --
            My rights don't end where your fear begins.
            • (Score: 4, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday March 02 2017, @10:39PM (1 child)

              by bob_super (1357) on Thursday March 02 2017, @10:39PM (#474162)

              > roughly moderate pain in the ass

              "I'll mark it for release by COB tomorrow, then" - My boss

              • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Thursday March 02 2017, @11:10PM

                by zocalo (302) on Thursday March 02 2017, @11:10PM (#474171)
                You have a good boss there. Most would want it yesterday. :)
                --
                UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
            • (Score: 2) by paulej72 on Friday March 03 2017, @01:13AM

              by paulej72 (58) on Friday March 03 2017, @01:13AM (#474200) Journal

              Actually the text is in the code. It could be a user preference and still work. I think we could do that. Also I think the right justification will work as well. The only reason it was not right justified, is that spot is current used for when a post gets marked as spam., but as this is not used as much it could get moved to second to right.

              --
              Team Leader for SN Development
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02 2017, @09:56PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02 2017, @09:56PM (#474143)

            Man, I was sure it was already a user setting. Must have gotten it mixed up with the dimming setting.

            But with my script there is definitely an option for me to wipe them out.

            Now that I am amassing like 5+ user settings, I might need to add a control panel somewhere so they don't need to be manually switched on/off every time the script is updated. I could even hijack the real /my/settings page to put them in one nice place.

    • (Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday March 02 2017, @07:48PM (3 children)

      by edIII (791) on Thursday March 02 2017, @07:48PM (#474052)

      Honestly, I dunno if it is a bug or not and you didn't list it, but the chevrons. They DO NOT act like the +/- buttons from before. I find myself clicking them like a puzzle to open up the comments. As a result, I browse at -1 now permanently to open up all the comments.

      You are now like origami. SoyOrigami :)

      --
      Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02 2017, @09:50PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02 2017, @09:50PM (#474139)

        On one of the previous threads I shared some CSS that attempted to replace the chevron (which is an image btw) with CSS-inserted + or - sign. It was crude but it was a 10 minute experiment. I manually deleted the chevron background image and tried to use CSS "content:" to put in a string. With some work I could polish it up if there is demand. However I don't think there is any difference between the functionality of the main chevron and the old +/- button.

        "Chevron 7 is... encoded?"

        The super expand button is another story. I'd need to look into it more. But from what I can tell there is no button in our current incarnation that will open all of the child comments guaranteed or your money back.

        The irony here is that we now have a pure CSS system and now the best solution may be for me to find and reintroduce the trashed JavaScript.

        Browsing -1/-1 is a good solution. Although now we are not guaranteed to see all comments in the first go because of the pagination.

        • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday March 02 2017, @11:13PM (1 child)

          by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday March 02 2017, @11:13PM (#474172) Homepage Journal

          We're likely going to do that anyway within the month. It's just been an exceptionally busy week and we're taking a day or three off.

          --
          My rights don't end where your fear begins.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @02:36AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @02:36AM (#474230)

            With nothing left unstable, I say Take Five. [youtube.com]

            Per your comment down the thread as to what comes next, here's one to send you on your way, courtesy of Andy Griffith and company: The Fishin' Hole [youtube.com]

            -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 2) by kazzie on Saturday March 04 2017, @08:24PM (5 children)

      by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Saturday March 04 2017, @08:24PM (#474996)

      Here's a new bug/feature I've just come across.

      Having received a message telling me that someone replied to one of my comments, I click on the link and see the article and the comment in question, correctly highlighted as new.

      When navigating to the article's main page to see what other comments have been posted, all comments are flagged as read. This includes comments made before and since the reply, which I'd not actually seen yet.

      I think I'm right in understanding that new/old comments are identified by a timestamp (or the most recent comment at time of viewing). Might it be better for this value not to be updated when following a link to a specific comment (e.g. comments.pl?sid=18301&cid=474819)?

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday March 04 2017, @09:19PM (4 children)

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday March 04 2017, @09:19PM (#475010) Journal

        I believe this might be an intended behavior... basically, if you have gone to one comment's specific page, you haven't had a chance to see other potential comments on the story. Given the fact that this read/unread comment system is very basic, this lack of updating errs on the side of you not missing any new comments. I think.

        --
        [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday March 06 2017, @02:03PM

      by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 06 2017, @02:03PM (#475608) Journal

      I thought the same as you, and then I was corrected by an etymologist. It appears that nexii is incorrect - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nexus: [wiktionary.org] nexus (plural nexuses or nexus). I learn more each day that shows how little I actually know...

      Try it in your browser dictionary. Both en-GB and en-US show that nexuses is the correct spelling, and they both bork on nexii.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by lcall on Thursday March 02 2017, @03:23PM

    by lcall (4611) on Thursday March 02 2017, @03:23PM (#473892)

    A big, though very inadequate, thanks to those that make this site work, for all the good they are doing for many others. I hope your rest is replenishing and the results are rewarding in the ways that matter most to you. (I know I could show the thanks by actually contributing, but not in a position to; wish I could now.)

  • (Score: 2) by jdavidb on Thursday March 02 2017, @03:28PM (4 children)

    by jdavidb (5690) on Thursday March 02 2017, @03:28PM (#473895) Homepage Journal
    Does anyone know how to get highest scored comments to come up at the top? For example, if I put my threshold at 3, then I'd like to see comments of 5 and their 3,4,5-rated replies, then comments of 4 and their 3,4,5-rated replies, etc.
    --
    ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:06PM

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:06PM (#473910) Homepage Journal

      We could do that per-page but not a per-story basis because of the way we pull only the necessary comments now and the way people can have wildly different score adjustments. If that's good enough I can throw that sorting mode back on the to-do list.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:28PM

      by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:28PM (#473923) Journal

      Does anyone know how to get highest scored comments to come up at the top? For example, if I put my threshold at 3, then I'd like to see comments of 5 and their 3,4,5-rated replies, then comments of 4 and their 3,4,5-rated replies, etc.

      Excellent question! Let me try a couple things really quick... Hmm? Ummm, yeah, sorry not at the moment; we are struggling to get "Threaded-TOS" and "Threaded-TNG" to select the correct comments based on different values of Threshold/Breakthrough, and then to display them correctly (Hide/Show Expand/Collapse). There HAD been a "Sort" parameter of "Score" at one time, but we now have just "Oldest First" and "Newest First".

      I think I see what you are attempting to do, but to add score sorting on top of the above is probably going to have to hold off until we get this part solid and well-understood. Then score sorting may be possible.

      For the time being, the best I can suggest is that, depending on your threaded mode (TOS/TNG), set both your Threshold (if available) and Breakthrough to 3.

      I just looked for the first, highly commented and moderated story I could find and tried some settings... take a look at the differences in how these are displayed:

      Threaded-TNG: https://soylentnews.org/politics/article.pl?sid=17/03/01/1833221&threshold=3&highlightthresh=3&commentsort=0&mode=threadtng&page=1&noupdate=1#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]

      Threaded-TOS: https://soylentnews.org/politics/article.pl?sid=17/03/01/1833221&threshold=3&highlightthresh=3&commentsort=0&mode=threadtos&page=1&noupdate=1#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]

      Alternatively.. start with the thresh/break set at 5, read; change to 4, read; then change to 3, read. Wish i could be more helpful!

      I appreciate the suggestion, will keep it in mind, and have mentioned it to the devs.

      --
      Wit is intellect, dancing.
    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday March 02 2017, @05:53PM (1 child)

      by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday March 02 2017, @05:53PM (#473962)

      Yeah, I thought that was how it used to work and was slightly surprised it wasn't in the options now.

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
      • (Score: 2) by jdavidb on Thursday March 02 2017, @06:44PM

        by jdavidb (5690) on Thursday March 02 2017, @06:44PM (#473995) Homepage Journal

        It did, but this was apparently a big enough change that that feature had to go away, for now at least. I did like it, but I'm getting all this for free, so it's hard to complain.

        Still beats beta! :)

        --
        ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:08PM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:08PM (#473911)

    If people keep insisting on No JavaScript then no wonder it takes forever to load up Stories WITH Hundreds of Comments instead of loading them asynchronously from separate micro-services.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:39PM (1 child)

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:39PM (#473929) Homepage Journal

      S'working out pretty well, all in all. Just because some people can't write efficient server-side code doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be done.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Thursday March 02 2017, @07:56PM

        by edIII (791) on Thursday March 02 2017, @07:56PM (#474055)

        That, and what the fuck is the difference between a page that loads 10% within 1 sec, 100% within 7 secs, and a page that loads in 7 seconds? All of that javascript is still going to take the same amount of time to load. If it wasn't fast enough, the scroll will jerk around or you will see spinning wheels for comments.

        Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of javascript/html5 too, but this site is working *just fine* without it. That, and I really like having a place I can go to without worrying about putting on a condom. The worst you ever did was to include PiWik I think, and that wasn't 3rd party.

        Plus, you guys have done amazing things on the backend in the last few years refactoring all of that old code which was higher priority.

        We may argue about politics, but the people here know how to come together and run a site. Well. Very appreciative of all the hard work of you and the staff members.

        --
        Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
    • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:45PM

      by Aiwendil (531) on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:45PM (#473932) Journal

      Works better since we only have zero to two redraws (loading css, and maybe loading charset).

      Also, since main reason for disliking JS is due to it being a huge resource hog (security is second) we can simply just load the page in a background tab and have a nice mostly-non-interactive page waiting for us when we've finished with the earlier tabs.

      (Now I actually allow js on soylent - but that is due to them keeping it sane (i.e.: minimal and only on specific userrequests))

      Seriously - I never even noticed the slowdown due to often having multiple minutes between loading and reading.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by mechanicjay on Thursday March 02 2017, @05:12PM (2 children)

      To each his own I guess.

      I actually really dislike sites that do a continuous load of new content as you scroll down for the following reason: When you reload the page and try to find something that was towards the bottom of wherever you left off -- good f'ing luck. Now you're wasting 5 minutes of scrolling and loading to hopefully find what you were looking for rather than just being able to do a find in the page.

      Philosophically, I agree with TMB, server side performance is something a lot of folks who build whiz-bang front-ends don't pay attention to (in my experience because they don't understand it). Leveraging the power of an RDBMS is key to this. I've, seen (and fixed) applications where basically a "Select *" is passed to php, or even worse the js in your browser, is left to sort it all out. In many cases the micro-service paradigm of only getting exactly what you need when you need, while potentially more data efficient can also be a band-aid over poor back-end design. Also in a situation where you're making hundreds, or hell, even dozens of web service calls, the round-trip time for each call really starts to add up and negatively impact the user-experience.

      Of course that's just one luddite web-infrastructure engineer's opinion, YMMV

      --
      My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
      • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday March 02 2017, @05:49PM

        by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday March 02 2017, @05:49PM (#473960)

        RDBMS

        RMS-DB anagrams to that. This needs to be a thing :)

        --
        "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Marand on Friday March 03 2017, @12:40AM

        by Marand (1081) on Friday March 03 2017, @12:40AM (#474189) Journal

        When you reload the page and try to find something that was towards the bottom of wherever you left off -- good f'ing luck. Now you're wasting 5 minutes of scrolling and loading to hopefully find what you were looking for rather than just being able to do a find in the page.

        I absolutely loathe that design for the same reason. It ends up wasting both my time and my bandwidth, and I usually just go "fuck this" and don't bother. It also means you can't leave it for later and pick up where you left off, because the next time you open the browser it's back at the start. Or if, like me, you use addons to automatically unload idle tabs, it resets back to top when the tab goes active again...

        Plus, they tend to be made with an assumption that the dynamic loading will never fail, so when it inevitably does, the only "fix" is to reload and start over. For example, Slashdot has become incredibly obnoxious about this with the threshold slider because I'm on a high-latency connection right now. I'll change the threshold, the little "working" spinner shows up, and then more often than not it times out and just leaves everything half-loaded with no fix except to reload and try again, because apparently they have something misconfigured and it makes high-latency connections time out constantly. Whatever they did, I have something like a 30% failure rate on loading anything there, so even if the page itself loads, changing the threshold tends to fail. (No other site I visit has this problem, so I lay the blame on them.)

        Dynamic loading also breaks browser navigation (back/forward) and pagination. So, yeah, it's just annoying all around.

    • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02 2017, @05:46PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02 2017, @05:46PM (#473959)

      loading them asynchronously from separate micro-services.

      I just came. Did you actualize it with a virtualized Ruby cloud server farm for maximum synergy and optimality?

  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:10PM (11 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:10PM (#473913) Homepage Journal

    Yesterday I sat down to fix a bug and couldn't even read my own code. Between that, the stress levels, and the fact that I haven't been fishing in over a month, I am in desperate need of some relaxation. So, I'm taking off until at least Saturday but likely Sunday and going camping and fishing.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:18PM

      by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:18PM (#473917) Journal

      Thanks to you and the others for the improvements. They're actual improvements, not just changes. It's clear that a lot of work and hard thought with planning went into them.

      Taut lines!

      --
      Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
    • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:20PM

      by zocalo (302) on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:20PM (#473918)
      Thanks for all the efforts from yourself and all the others - really liking the improvements here!
      Have fun, and looking forwards to the tale of the one that got away being posted next week. :)
      --
      UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
    • (Score: 5, Funny) by takyon on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:24PM (1 child)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:24PM (#473922) Journal

      You just have to imagine the codebase as a lake, keyboard as a boat/rod, and the bugs as fish.

      Back to work, codeslave!

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
      • (Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday March 02 2017, @06:30PM

        by bob_super (1357) on Thursday March 02 2017, @06:30PM (#473982)

        It's easy to do with my current project: A river [of tears] runs through it.

    • (Score: 2) by DECbot on Thursday March 02 2017, @07:15PM

      by DECbot (832) on Thursday March 02 2017, @07:15PM (#474018) Journal

      while( tmb.isStressed() )
          fish++; // good luck!

      --
      cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
    • (Score: 3, Funny) by Marand on Friday March 03 2017, @12:44AM (5 children)

      by Marand (1081) on Friday March 03 2017, @12:44AM (#474191) Journal

      Yesterday I sat down to fix a bug and couldn't even read my own code.

      Sounds like a normal day working with Perl, to me. :)

      (and I say this as someone that likes Perl.)

      • (Score: 2) by paulej72 on Friday March 03 2017, @01:22AM (4 children)

        by paulej72 (58) on Friday March 03 2017, @01:22AM (#474204) Journal

        LOL. That is even more so with Rehash. Some of the code is scary enough that I am afraid to touch it. Knock wood, I hope it never breaks.

        --
        Team Leader for SN Development
        • (Score: 2) by Marand on Friday March 03 2017, @02:46AM (3 children)

          by Marand (1081) on Friday March 03 2017, @02:46AM (#474232) Journal

          Yeah, a while back when SN was just starting to get real feature improvements added to it, I got the idea that I might join up and help out since I've used Perl since the late '90s (though I'm rusty now because I started using functional languages more).

          Then I saw the actual code and nope'd out. It's like someone confused a list of bad practices with a TODO list, and I probably would have nuked the codebase from orbit and started over before trying to fix that nightmare.

          I appreciate that you guys are willing to work on and update/fix its problems, but in my opinion the sanity loss isn't worth the pay. :)

          • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday March 03 2017, @03:16AM (2 children)

            by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Friday March 03 2017, @03:16AM (#474246) Homepage Journal

            It's gotten considerably better since then. The only really harry bits are in the database anymore since I deleted about 2/3rds of the codebase about a year or so ago

            --
            Still always moving
            • (Score: 2) by Marand on Friday March 03 2017, @04:07AM (1 child)

              by Marand (1081) on Friday March 03 2017, @04:07AM (#474257) Journal

              That's good to hear, and not very surprising. You guys seem to care about doing shit right.

              ... Plus I don't think making it worse would have been possible without deliberate effort. ;)

              • (Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Friday March 03 2017, @03:11PM

                by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Friday March 03 2017, @03:11PM (#474371) Homepage Journal

                Well, there's a rather notorious hack in place that emulates some of mod_perl 1.3 behavior. The original mod_perl implementation allowed you to read/write form values so that later function calls could access them. In Apache 2.x, the STORE method in APR was removed for form variables and a whole lot of code depended on that behavior. My solution was to write a global hook that checks the first time the $r variable is accessed, and copy the entire thing into local storage so I didn't have to edit a million lines throughout the codebase.

                I also remember I had to do some rather arcane magic to hold process wide state data via the barely documented pnotes API.

                --
                Still always moving
  • (Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday March 02 2017, @05:03PM (2 children)

    by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 02 2017, @05:03PM (#473942) Journal

    It seems my sense of things was correct: we are all pretty-well burnt out at this point.

    Today is my first day off from my full-time job since "Go Live" with the site upgrade. Then it is back to work tomorrow and 4 more days after that. The first two of those days promise to be especially busy. Oh, and I have a new manager, too.

    I think I can safely say for all of the staff here that we do NOT want to leave things hanging, but we need to step back for a bit and recharge our batteries, so to speak. Then we can take a fresh look at the big picture and reassess priorities for what needs to be done.

    I happened upon this bit of wisdom about 30 years ago; it seems apropos at this time (emphasis added):

    Strive to understand your problem;     Don' t try to solve it. A fully-stated problem —     embodies its solution.

    I'm too wiped out to do much today, and I have pressing responsibilities in my private life that I have put on hold while working with the team on this release. As much as it pains me to do so, I need to admit that I need some downtime to recuperate, too.

    On a more positive note, one of the most amazing things about working with this team is the tremendous sense of self-motivation that I see. Nobody is cracking a whip to get us to do stuff. We want to do it. Please be patient with us while we pause to recharge in the hope of returning energized and invigorated.

    If you want to help, please take a few minutes and submit a story — our editorial team is running short-staffed at the moment, too. And, of course, keep those thoughtful (and funny!) comments coming, too!

    --
    Wit is intellect, dancing.
    • (Score: 3, Funny) by NCommander on Friday March 03 2017, @01:23AM (1 child)

      by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Friday March 03 2017, @01:23AM (#474205) Homepage Journal

      I apologize for the lack of whipping. I had to drop it off at the leatherworkers to have it retreaded after it wore out. */sarcasm*

      --
      Still always moving
      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Friday March 03 2017, @02:53AM

        by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 03 2017, @02:53AM (#474235) Journal

        Annnd now I know why some young folk are called "Whippersnappers".

        - A gray-going-on-white-beard

        =)

        --
        Wit is intellect, dancing.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02 2017, @07:15PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02 2017, @07:15PM (#474019)

    It would be nice if the ( Parent ) link on each post was a little smarter, depending on context:

    (1) If the parent post is collapsed, just expand it and reposition the page so its at the top of window
    (2) If the parent post is not on the current page (like you are viewing a thread fragment) then behave like it currently does and load a new page with the parent

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday March 02 2017, @07:46PM

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday March 02 2017, @07:46PM (#474051) Homepage Journal

      I really dig that particular idea but a lot of people would bitch because it's a change in expected behavior.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02 2017, @09:59PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02 2017, @09:59PM (#474146)

      I will look into adding it to the script. Not sure if I would like that more than the expected behavior, but I tend to browse at -1/-1 and then click the parent comment's CID in order to get it on its own.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @02:03AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @02:03AM (#474217)

    The chevron buttons are WAY TOO SMALL.
    Especially for someone browsing on a smart phone, they are too small of a clickable target and are MUCH SMALLER than the OLD target.
    The old target was the hyperlink for the unexpanded comment. Why not bring back the usability Soylent had before and bring back a hyperlink for the unexpanded comment? (You can keep the little buttons too.) Clicking either the expand chevron or the unexpanded comment title hyperlink should expand the comment.

  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday March 03 2017, @04:13AM (2 children)

    by butthurt (6141) on Friday March 03 2017, @04:13AM (#474258) Journal

    Formerly, comments by users who had journals would have a link labelled "Journal" leading to the user's journal. Those links aren't present any more.

    • (Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday March 03 2017, @05:47AM (1 child)

      by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 03 2017, @05:47AM (#474280)

      Clicking your username links to your user page, which includes your last journal post, as well as a list of recent comments. Does this not give sufficient functionality? (I make no use of journals myself.)

      • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday March 03 2017, @06:24AM

        by butthurt (6141) on Friday March 03 2017, @06:24AM (#474285) Journal

        To be honest, I most often read the journals via the "Most Recent Journal Entries" list on the main page or via notifications about the ones I'm subscribed to. Occasionally I would follow the link from a comment. The nice thing about it, as compared to following the link from someone's username, was that it indicated whether someone kept a journal or not. If it was removed for being visual clutter, perhaps the "open book" symbol (📖) with a mouseover of "journal" or an icon like the ones we already have for friend/foe relations could replace it. I don't know how to do that in a way that's friendly to blind readers.

  • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Friday March 03 2017, @11:41AM (1 child)

    by Aiwendil (531) on Friday March 03 2017, @11:41AM (#474321) Journal

    Once you've put out the fires I'd like to see an option to make "*NEW*" clickable, with the function of jumping to the next *NEW* (and to either start_of_comments or end_of_page or next_page if last *NEW* [on page]), possibly also having "comments" (the word comments, above where you change comment-view, between TFA and comments) jump to first "*NEW*".

    As an option since this will be very annoying for some (currently it is safe to drag-to-scroll on the right-hand side without risking a misclick)

    This is a feature that mainly will make sense in chrome/android (and other browsers that obscures/hilights when searching) and where it is a multi-step procedure to search.

    (While on that subject, having a "1st post"-link (jump to top of first page of comments) near the page-index (near end of comment-pages) would be handy on devices without an easily accessible "home"-key ´.

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Saturday March 04 2017, @12:57AM

      by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Saturday March 04 2017, @12:57AM (#474707) Journal

      Once you've put out the fires I'd like to see an option to make "*NEW*" clickable, with the function of jumping to the next *NEW* (and to either start_of_comments or end_of_page or next_page if last *NEW* [on page]), possibly also having "comments" (the word comments, above where you change comment-view, between TFA and comments) jump to first "*NEW*".

      As an option since this will be very annoying for some (currently it is safe to drag-to-scroll on the right-hand side without risking a misclick)

      This is a feature that mainly will make sense in chrome/android (and other browsers that obscures/hilights when searching) and where it is a multi-step procedure to search.

      (While on that subject, having a "1st post"-link (jump to top of first page of comments) near the page-index (near end of comment-pages) would be handy on devices without an easily accessible "home"-key ´.

      Interesting ideas! I have some minor misgivings about making "*NEW*" a link, and whether or not it is even feasible to implement. Need to consider it some more. (This reply will make it easier for me to find your suggestion again. =)

      I very much like the idea of a link at the bottom of the page to take you back to the top. I use the "Home" key on my home system quite often, but there is no analog on Android, as I have also found. A link to take you back to the top (of the story, or to the beginning of the first comment) would be useful. Of course, if we implement that here, we would need to do something similar across all (potentially long) pages on the site, so it behooves us to come up with an action that is the same in all cases.

      Thanks for the suggestions!

      --
      Wit is intellect, dancing.
  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday March 04 2017, @03:12AM (1 child)

    by butthurt (6141) on Saturday March 04 2017, @03:12AM (#474747) Journal

    I opened a story,

    /politics/article.pl?sid=17/03/01/1833221 [soylentnews.org]

    Below the summary, the page says that there are 148 comments. However, the menus for
    Threshold/Breakthrough say that there are 110 comments with a score of -1 or higher.

    For another story,

    /article.pl?sid=17/03/02/0527212 [soylentnews.org]

    the respective numbers are 176 and 105. For any particular story, those two numbers were formerly the same. For the topic I'm posting to, the numbers before I posted were both 52.

    For another topic the numbers were 193 and 104.

    /article.pl?sid=17/02/12/1618241 [soylentnews.org]

    I'm not noticing it on stories that have just a few comments. Could this be due to the pagination?

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 06 2017, @05:56PM

      That's expected behavior. The numbers in the dropdown lists are per-page now because we only pull and adjust (or don't adjust, according to your preferences) the scores of the page you're reading. That got us about a 33% rendering time decrease, so don't look for it to change.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Sunday March 05 2017, @05:16AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Sunday March 05 2017, @05:16AM (#475145) Journal

    I got a 500 error a few minutes ago, while following the link from a comment's ID number.

    https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=18308&page=1&cid=474968#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]

    When I tried a second time, the page opened properly.

(1)