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from the prevention-goes-a-long-way dept.
So, every once in awhile, if things have been quiet, I like to pop a post seeing what the general feelings of the community are towards the site, seeing what we could do better, etc. I think its been a few months since the last time I posted in Meta, so I think this is a good time to get a pulse on the community, and provide a venue to get any feedback (good or bad).
On the staff side, I know things have been relatively quiet over the summer due to most of us being busy with life and such, which is why we haven't made a major site upgrade since the original rehash upgrade at the end of May. For myself, I've been working at a new job, and dealing with a fair bit of non-Soylent related things to the point that I really only have the time or energy to post, and occasional check in, and I'd like to thank the rest of the staff, and mrcoolbp in particular for holding down the fort for me.
Anyway, in contrast to my usual posts, I'm going to cut this off here, and will be looking forward to your comments below.
73 from NCommander
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 17 2015, @01:03PM
I'd like to see an option to highlight new comments since I last viewed a discussion. Something like store a last-read timestamp for each discussion in the user's database record - or maybe even just stored in cookies that get set/reset each time a discussion is loaded. Then when displaying the discussion, change the background color of the posts and their subject-lines (so it is visible in the collapsed views). Right now you have to set it to view comments newest first and ignore threads which means you lose the context. That's not terrible when the number of comments is small, but get up past 30 or so and it is a PITA.
(Score: 2) by AndyTheAbsurd on Tuesday November 17 2015, @02:28PM
Modded up because this is a great idea.
If the SN devs won't do it, I bet somebody could bang together a GreaseMonkey script for it.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 2) by AndyTheAbsurd on Tuesday November 17 2015, @02:31PM
Also, a "load new replies" button per thread would be neat! Possibly one of these ideas is a lot harder to implement than the other, though.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 2) by termigator on Tuesday November 17 2015, @07:06PM
Not knowing the specifics of the SN codebase, so take this with a grain of salt: one potential method is to store last time the main post was loaded for the user. If a timestamp is associated with each comment (can be stored in a custom data attribute in the DOM) a little javascript can be used to highlight those comments that are dated later than last load time (highlighting done by adding a CSS class to newer comment nodes, where the class used has whatever styling is used to highlight).
After highlighting, set the last load time stored with the user record to current time. You keep the previous last-load time on the current page so you can properly highlight replies that have yet-to-be loaded because they are under a collapsed node. When the node is expanded, the previous load time is used for purposes of highlighting
This method does not track if each individual comment is viewed, but it may be good enough for most people.
If javascript is disabled, and you are not logged in, you do not get this feature. Supporting no javascript is doable, but may not be worth the effort.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday November 18 2015, @04:10AM
Not knowing the specifics of the SN codebase
That can be easily remedied [github.com].
There's even a VM Image [soylentnews.org] you can work with.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday November 19 2015, @01:02AM
Wrong repo, slashcode is the legacy Apache 1.3 codebase. We keep it separate for sites who want to upgrade to rehash (and there have been discussions for non-SN sites on that point). Main repo is here: https://github.com/SoylentNews/rehash [github.com]
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday November 19 2015, @02:19AM
What NC said and also, the VM image is pre-rehash. Prehash? Whatever. Anyway, we're all currently working off of the dev server because the bloody VM building process requires the awesome skillz of NC instead of my merely wondrous skillz.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday November 19 2015, @03:30AM
What NC said and also, the VM image is pre-rehash. Prehash? Whatever. Anyway, we're all currently working off of the dev server because the bloody VM building process requires the awesome skillz of NC instead of my merely wondrous skillz.
Thanks to NC and TMB for correcting me.
My apologies to all for the incorrect information. I guess I was having a rough night last night.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr