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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 Appalbarry on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:01PM (16 children)
THANK YOU!!! For killing this off. It ruined the site for me.
Gee, imagine what would happen if a tech related discussion site made big changes to their front end, then refused to budge when users complained?
PS Thank you as well for not enabling emojis and avatars.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:15PM (2 children)
I seemed to have missed the majority of the problems--not sure if it it was because I missed the window of opportunity or if it was because of my preferred theme (VT220)/discussion threading (D1/classic threaded-->threaded/TOS with -1/0 Threshold/Breakthrough). None the less, this is how beta should be done. Long live the beta! FUCK BETA!
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:29PM (1 child)
Honestly, the problem with beta wasn't so much the change itself, it was the utter disrespect to the community as they did it. If DICE had actually given a shit to the community, I probably won't have cared enough to help get SN off the ground.
I wasn't thrilled with the updated comments on beta, though I did like the new article layout and such. That being said, the anti-JS crowd has always been a large group of old /., and here, and Beta was a giant FUCK YOU to them since even with the D2 discussion system, you could turn it off and get D1 (which is what we launched with here, and then had D1.5).
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:26PM
Don't forget the Trendy Whitespace Everywhere...
Thanks for keeping SN content*-dense
*quality of content varies by location.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:16PM (2 children)
We knew that changing commenting was going to get people to go to the Pitchfork Emporium and hunt us down. The only way we were going to do this was by making sure that we were communicating to the userbase as we did it. The loss of some functionality is unfortunate, but having the servers melting into slag is even worse. This is the first time in at least a year the servers aren't popping load warnings when we get a 100+ comment story, and the page load speeds have actually gotten to something resembling reasonable.
The original fold/collaspe implementation was implemented in JavaScript and switched to server side rendering due to the fact our userbase is very anti-JS. For non-admins, I think there are a few bits of non-essential vestigial JS here and there. Admins get jQuery dynamically loaded as the admin interface requires it, and none of us can work up enough of a damn as only editors are affected.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:46PM (1 child)
/me goes and cries in a corner 'cuz nobody loves us
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Tuesday February 28 2017, @08:14PM
s'ok, cmn.... we have each other... *bro hugs*
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:33PM (3 children)
BTW, the related links have a scroll bar now. On this very story.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:47AM (2 children)
That has been around for a year. NCommander diatribes were causing the box to over flow with too many links. We felt that the easiest way to fix it was to limit the box with a scrollbar. It only happens when the story has lots of links.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday March 01 2017, @07:12AM (1 child)
I never felt there was something to fix. If the link box is large, it is large; so what? But the scroll bar is annoying. Even more so if, like in this case, there's a ton of white space below the box.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @11:53AM
Some stories were the opposite. The Related links was much much longer than the story and thus pushed the comment top bay below the story. I really don't think we will change this.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:49PM
Lol wut 😂😂😂😂😂😂👌
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:49PM (1 child)
It's long been possible to have Unicode-style emoji in the bodies of comments and stories.
/article.pl?sid=15/05/14/1140253 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:28AM
Guess that demonstrates just how much attention I pay to emojis. I'm just one of those old timers that think we got by JUST FINE with words, and paragraphs, and sentences.
(Score: 2) by romlok on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:50PM (2 children)
Shamelessly attaching my comment to the FP, as my complaint is related to scrolling:
On narrow displays, the "Post Comment" box (technically, the "generalbody" within the "post_comment") has a horizontal scrollbar, which on narrow displays causes this textarea to be wider than the visible area, and so scroll horizontally as you type.
The cause appears to be that the non-wrapping "Allowed HTML" line is now so long that it pushes the minimum width of the box beyond what I normally allow.
Semantically speaking, they should really be styled
s within a
(Score: 2) by romlok on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:55PM (1 child)
Dag nabbit! Even as I was typing that out I was thinking, "make sure to preview this to make sure you work within the site's HTML parser."
But did I? Noooooo!
Try again:
Semantically speaking, they should really be styled <li>s within a <ul>, but a quick fix would be to add a space before and/or after each separator.
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Thursday March 02 2017, @02:31AM
Yeah that needs some fixing. That is a direct dump of the var from the db. It should be styled in some manner. This is a fairly easy fix so it may come soonish, but it will be after we get the big bugs out of the way.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:11PM (13 children)
Cuz somebody has to. No request other than restoration of "nested" comment display option. All good otherwise. You guys rock.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:17PM (6 children)
Can you try Threaded-TNG, and then manipulate the score, or be more specific on how things need to change.
On the whole, none of us really spotted much difference between Nested and Threaded overall, but the original code implementation was incredibly convoluted and scary so I'm not exactly surprised we missed something subtle. Last I checked, almost all the editors used Improved Threaded last time we checked the database.
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:27PM (5 children)
Before -1 nested would show all comments, nested. Thread-TNG seems to do the trick, but changing to it also changes score threshold to 2 (default?), so needs another step to change it back to -1.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:36PM (2 children)
Thread-TNG seems to do the trick, but changing to it also changes score threshold to 2 (default?),
I'm not seeing that. I switched to TNG, and my threshold remained the same.
Maybe that one extra step is your AC penance?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:03PM (1 child)
> Maybe that one extra step is your AC penance?
Screw you.
Seriously.
Your dislike of ACs is not a justification for giving them a deliberately poor user experience.
Especially when all it would take is a change in the default behavior.
The previous version of the site defaulted to the most functional settings, there is no reason the newest version of the site can't either.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:10PM
OP AC here. Maybe frojack is suggesting that the behavior may be specific to AC mode (i.e., not logged in)?
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:45PM (1 child)
For AC, we may need to change the default Breakthrough to a lower number.
Also we may have a bug in the breakthrough setting code that I need to check on tonight.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @09:48PM
I don't tend to -click- links.
I drag and drop them into a blanked Address Bar and modify them there.
I make sure that I add &threshold=-1&highlightthresh=-1 to those, so I don't tend to see what GP does.
Your lower-default-breakthrough notion would seem to be the trick for him.
WRT nested, after I (finally) embraced improvedthreaded (the default before the recent update), I found that the limit of 50 comments per page (for someone not signed in??) had expanded to 100 and I never looked back.
Don't know why anyone would want nested any more.
I want to once again emphasize the importance of a good presentation for ACs.
...in particular, newbies who e.g. found something interesting via a search engine and showed up here and haven't yet tweaked their cookies.
I think that you guys continue to be headed in the proper direction.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:43PM (4 children)
I think I may do that tomorrow and see if I can rework the old Improved Threaded javascript on it for them as like javascript. Mind you, this ain't a promise. I suck the balls at javascript on account of hating its breathing guts too much to ever get any practice in with it. Just creating a Nested mode should be dirt simple though. It's essentially exactly the same as Threaded-TNG but with Threshold restored, so I can reuse most of the already written code.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:46PM (3 children)
Um... I read the site with javascript disabled, so any solution involving (browser side) javascript will not help me and others like me.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:17AM (2 children)
Noted. Anything we do in the future with js should fail back gracefully to the CSS-only version of collapsible comments.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @06:07AM (1 child)
Is this why expand/collapse is now broken?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:03PM
How so?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:44AM
The onion site often responds with only the meta section or the breaking section with no real way to get out. Even manually changing the URL has no effect on that but usually a bit of time, say 10 minutes or so, followed by reload brings up the right section of the site.
Otherwise, it's much improved.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jelizondo on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:13PM
Regardless of how the site looks in the end, I want to congratulate the team for doing a lot of work and being willing to undo some of it in light of the opinion of a majority of soylentils.
The ample communication with the team and the response gives me high hope the site will last a long time thanks to the efforts of this great team.
Cheers!
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:21PM (4 children)
Any word on Nested view?
There is a workaround (setting Breakthrough/Threshold to a lower value) but I feel like it's a popular enough view mode that it deserves a place in the drop-down list.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:23PM (3 children)
I'll have to check with TMB/Paul but we might re-add Nested as a threading mode that basically does that on the back end to emulate the old behavior. That being said, we've had trouble figuring out what exactly the difference between Threading and Nested was. The backend code for this is/was absolutely convoluted, and the only thing was clear was it did pagination (which is now present in all modes)
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:36PM
Pretty similar to Threaded with the Breakthrough/Threshold at 0 I think. When it hit a -1 instead of the collapsible tree it would just have a link saying "X replies beneath your current threshold." If I felt like reading the flamebait and any rebuttals I would middle-click this and it would open the whole collapsed sub-thread in a new tab.
It appears to still work on /. if you want to compare...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @09:45PM (1 child)
For me, nested gave 50 comments per page.
improvedthreaded (and now the new default) gives 100 comments per page (with the proper highlightthresh).
It's been a long time since nested wasn't inferior.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:54PM
Flat, TNG ,and TOS all give up to 100 nowadays. Really TNG is misnamed if you think about it since it's basically just a slightly different Nested and Nested was older than Threaded.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:44PM (10 children)
Messages: Notification of reply. The link results in
OK
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Anyone else encounter this?
Also, I love how karma and mod points have been wildly fluctuating during this process. It has taught me to once again realize the impermanence of all things.
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:49PM
We know of a few of these errors, but we have not been able to track them down. Our error logs are not showing the specific errors.
Also the karma and mod points should not be fluctuating, other than by changes due to mods that are made against you and mods you spend.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:56PM (8 children)
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.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:30PM (7 children)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
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)
Seems to be fixed! Good job, dev team(s)!
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday March 02 2017, @05:18AM
Oh, and now (when did this happen? Not UTC 00:10!) I have mod points. As Alice said, "Curiouser and curiouser!"
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:11PM (4 children)
Okay: there are problems with tablets that are probably harder to solve.
I want to give 3K thumbs up to the guys (gals? He/She/It/Shim?) doing the hard work.
As per stuff like *spoiler and *URL, on a tablet, it would be sooooo much easier to be able to click a button and put your URL (especially!!!!!!) or even a spoiler or bold marking without having to go through the tablet fecking fuck (errrr... i mean gui) to do it.
Typing out 'less than' URL: url you want'closing less than/more than' is a pissing pain on a tablet: i'm talking: cancerous, problem with the pissing, pain in the pisser. On A TABLET!
Once back into normal browser mode, it isn't that hard to type 'quote' '/quote', or URL: etc.
I think everything else is GRRRREAT! You are all doing fabulously.
The changes are amazing.
I thank you.
Applause, because you may not understand: if i had a million dollars, i'd buy a green dress (for Ethanol: just because) and i'd purchase a lifetime subscription.
The work you do is appreciated, and i love the site (less so on tablet).
Fuck slashdot....fuck Andrew DICE /.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:42PM (1 child)
is a pissing pain on a tablet
Exactly This.
But on a tablet, or phone, you can usually solve this by installing a different/additional keyboard and pay the price of switching keyboards (three taps on my particular phone) once each time you visit sites like SN, rather then once each time you post.
On my particular device, the factory keyboard actually works better than my preferred keyboard (Google's "Gboard").
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday February 28 2017, @08:44PM
I solved this with an old folding bluetooth keyboard. (old as in 'HP iPAQ' & 'Palm TX' era)
I get much better typing speeds on that thing and a detachable stand for the tablet too.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:00PM (1 child)
You can just paste the URL in if you like. The servers convert it to a clickable link automagically. Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WpMlwVwydo [youtube.com]
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:54AM
Yeah, I found that out just today when I was going to be lazy and just paste it without the formatting.
D'oh!
Now I like the changes even more! :)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:23PM (12 children)
On the old site, after I posted a comment I would be taken to a page that showed my comment, with the story above. By reloading that page, I could readily see whether anyone had replied. On the new site, I'm taken to a page that has the story and everyone's comments. I can, of course, search within the page for my own and, having found it, click on its number to get to the page about it. That takes a little bit more effort, though.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:31PM (3 children)
It takes me to the offset my new comment on the story page.
Clicking the comment number there, gets you back to that comment-specific page.
I prefer to be back to the story, it saves me the extra click. Change approved!
Inline commenting would be even better (still could scroll to read/copy/paste from the whole thread), but I like the incremental improvement.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday February 28 2017, @08:51PM (2 children)
I tend to fall in the "No Javascript" crowd, but I'd think the inline comment would be a great feature for those who feel secure in their JS environment setup and the new page a great backup function for when JS is disabled. Sites that cannot run without JS I feel are broken, but light use of JS for design or function purposes are nice. That said, heavy JS use with unfettered JS/Flash access for advertisers and CDNs and other third/fourth/fifth parties is not acceptable website design.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:55AM (1 child)
But commenting is not a light use of JS as it needs to send and receive data from the server. This means ajax or soap or some other stuff to send the data back and forth.
I just deployed a fix for the redirects that will bring you back to your comment when you are not on page 1. The page var was not getting passed through the posting process properly.
I hope this helps.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:51PM
Could "Reply to This" open the comment form in an iframe inside the existing page?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:53PM
Like bob said, it should take you right to the comment you just made. Maybe just make a rapid middle-click on the #472976 link, and then continue reading other comments on the story. Then close that tab and leave the other one open.
This behavior might be a good place for a new user setting [soylentnews.org], however.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 28 2017, @08:06PM (2 children)
On the new site, I'm taken to a page that has the story and everyone's comments. I can, of course, search within the page for my own and, having found it, click on its number to get to the page about it.
This is an inconsistency in the new design that goes beyond mere stylistic issues.
I disabled dimming of "read" posts because even in my shit-post-iest moments I do the others the honor of re-reading the entire thread before diving in and writing something to be as on topic and well placed as possible. In the unlikely event its not a good post, at least it wasn't for lack of trying. I figure if thousands have to read what I post, I have the obligation to at least (re)read a couple posts to keep things on track, make it more worth reading than if I just jumped in talking without listening.
So that's an inconsistency in the new design, in that its good that you get encouraged to re-read the gist of the discussion via scroll placement, but the new design should also by default not dim, because not dimming also encourages re-read via not screwing up contrast.
In summary I think better posts come from (re)reading more posts and the new design is somewhat inconsistent about that overall goal.
Although if the worst thing I can find to complain about is I toggled exactly one default setting, well, that's a pretty successful redesign overall.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:24PM (1 child)
That's not an inconsistency if you're not taken back to your comment in the entire page of comments, it's a bug. When you comment it should always take you to the comment you just made.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:08PM
Huh I very specifically tried to reproduce my poor bug report and failed. File it as unreproducible. Maybe someone was messin with it while I was messin with it originally. Could be just bad luck.
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:57AM
There was a bug, that is now fixed, where if you posted on any page > 1 you would not be sent to your new comment.
I hope this remedies your issues.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:33PM (2 children)
This doesn't scale well to many comments, but fortunately you get an async notification in the message centre for replies. Unfortunately, the UI there is a pain and doesn't make it easy to tell the difference between replies to different posts in the same thread without opening them all in new tabs and closing the redundant ones.
Going back to the main story is a massive waste of bandwidth for me, because (in the absence of in-page commenting) I don't want to lose my place when I comment so I always open the comment window in a new tab. At the end, I then have two pages open pointing to the same page, so I close one. Worse, the new one marks all of the new comments above where I was reading as read, so I don't get any benefit from the ugly '*NEW*' annotations everywhere, because a bunch of new comments are tracked as old as a result of this misfeature.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:36PM
Worse, the new one marks all of the new comments above where I was reading as read, so I don't get any benefit from the ugly '*NEW*' annotations everywhere, because a bunch of new comments are tracked as old as a result of this misfeature.
Check carefully, because that doesn't sound likely.
1st, that would be a bug, as we were told (in the 1st article about the comment changes, IIRC) that posting comments would not affect the *NEW*/fading behavior. (Is there a "noupdate=1" parameter in the URL after you comment?)
2nd, since the *NEW*/fading are controlled by a single comment ID, with all older comments faded and all newer comments *NEW*ed (subject to settings, of course), I can't see how such a bug could only affect comments above where you were reading.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:24PM
> [...] you get an async notification in the message centre for replies.
Yes, except when commenting anonymously.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:31PM (2 children)
What is the intended purpose of the Spoiler tag?
We've already seen an example [soylentnews.org] it being re-purposed to get lengthy attribution boilerplate out of stories, and it seems likely it even more variations on that theme may arise over time.
Was this the intent? If so, would there be a better name than "Spoiler", or perhaps allow user supplied alternative titles?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @08:34PM
...those who wanted to be able to post reviews 🎥
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:26PM
For this:
Snape kills Dumbledore!
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Celestial on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:39PM (3 children)
I browse with Threshold at "1" and Breakthrough at "1" using the Threaded-TOS style. I previously used the Improved Threaded style. If the comment at a start of a thread was rated "0" or "-1," it would be hidden, but I would still see responses rated "1" or above. I noticed this morning that now I see all originating thread comments rated at "0" (not sure about -1), if someone posts a responding comment rated "1" or above. I changed my Threshold to "2" and Breakthrough to "2" to see, and the same applied there. I could still see "0" rated originating thread comments if someone responded with a comment rated "2" or above. An example would be here [soylentnews.org].
Is this change intentional?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:46PM
The most irritating thing for me (either here or on The Other Site), is it seems like every time there's an update, I have to go twaddling the settings to get my damn visibility/expansion thresholds fixed back to the way they were before.
"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 The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:35PM (1 child)
That was a conscious design decision to have Breakthrough override Threshold. Previously you could have a gerzillion +5 comments in reply to a -1 comment and you would never see them set at 1/1. Technically I think we could still show the Comment Below Threshold message instead of the comment subject and expand the tree out below it to the +5s, but it provides contextual information as to what the +5s are replying to to show the subject.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Celestial on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:01AM
Gotcha, thanks.
(Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:46PM
Keep up the good work!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:57PM
If you have any feature requests or bug reports for my extension (link in sig), put them here.
I am looking at:
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Tuesday February 28 2017, @08:28PM (1 child)
This is a bit off-topic, but since we're being Meta...
It would be *really* nice if when following an "in reply to your comment" link from the Message Center, you had the option to "unfold" the comment thread that preceded the comment, rather than using the immediately relevant comment as the head. Heck, you could even just link to the comment in-place in the original story page.
As it is, it makes any sort of serious conversations really annoying, since you have to go to the original story page and search for the comment in question to get more in-depth context, refer back to previous points, etc.
In-place replying would be really nice too, for basically the same reason, but I can see how that might be a lot more demanding, and at this point I've acclimated to having to open a new tab to make a reply. And that's not nearly as annoying, since you're already at the relevant place in the main comment thread for reference.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:38PM
I've thought that before too. Remind us a month or two from now when we're through with the bugs/bitches fixing from the upgrade and have bitcoin payments working again and I'll see if I can work something up for that. May be nothing but a link to the top of that thread that you can open in another tab but there should be a handy way to view it without having to hit the back button.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(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
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 28 2017, @09:37PM (3 children)
What is the difference between Threaded-TOS and Threaded-TNG? It is not immediately obvious.
Maybe tooltips or explanatory text in the preference pages might be helpful?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:00AM (2 children)
TNG is basically Nested without Threshold and with the Expand/Collapse chevrons tacked on. Every comment tree gets fully branched out with Breakthrough determining if individual comments are in an expanded or collapsed state.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:03AM (1 child)
Today the onion site is not showing the CSS chevrons to click to show the nested comments. The post titles are indented but nothing is shown in the indented space to click on. Likewise the comments that are folded are unaccessible because they are not hyperlinked. There the folded comment titles could use some formatting, maybe a colored background, to differentiate them from the text of the comment above them.
Performance seems much improved.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:09PM
It's probably the CSP doing that. I'll look into it after I polish off this bug I'm working on.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday February 28 2017, @09:49PM (2 children)
When I get a message about a comment reply and attempt to follow the link to see the response, it's linking to the top of the page instead of to the page's #commentwrap anchor. Not an issue for short summaries, but it definitely stands out with longer articles like these meta ones. Same happens when following links to comments from the user pages.
It seems like the links in these places should point to the comment anchor instead of starting at the top of the page and forcing the user to scroll past the summary. It's the difference in getting pointed here [soylentnews.org] or here [soylentnews.org]. (From the older meta article.) The latter is much more usable.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:01AM (1 child)
Cheers, it's on the slate to fix.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:03AM
Awesome, thanks. I don't even know if the behaviour had changed with the update or if it always did that, since the summaries are usually short enough that it's practically the same thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @09:53PM (17 children)
I'd like to request that markdown support [wikipedia.org] be added in the next major release of the software.
Practically every other site on the net supports markdown now. Besides standardization there is a lot less typing - for example italics are just * characters like *this* instead of full-blown open and close i tags.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:42PM (13 children)
Practically every other site on the net supports markdown now. Besides standardization there is a lot less typing - for example italics are just * characters like *this* instead of full-blown open and close i tags.
There is no clearly defined Markdown standard, apart from the original writeup and implementation by John Gruber, which some consider abandonware.[17][18] This has led to fragmentation as different vendors write their own variants of the language to correct flaws or add missing features.
If it's opt-in, okay whatever, but keep your auto-manglement out of my defaults.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:05PM
Automanglement like eating < signs?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:37PM (6 children)
You seem to be implying that markdown isn't really standardized.
I could see how a naive reading of those quotes would lead you to believe that. But that would be an incorrect reading. It is true that various sites have indeed added their own extras in order to support extended functionality. But soylent isn't the kind of site that has much in the way of extended functionality. Hell, much of what is in baseline markdown doesn't even exist here - for example there isn't even support for drawing a horizontal line. So no, the standard baseline for markdown is more than enough for soylent's requirements.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:03AM (5 children)
If you really, really want to be able to insert a <hr> tag, we can do that. In like two minutes. It's just not a highly requested feature.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:47AM (2 children)
woosh!
seriously, you have huge forest-blindness problem
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:23AM
Man, I been coding for I can't remember how long over the past few weeks. You could throw a brick at me and I'd be like "huh?".
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:41PM
Being a software developer is a constant battle to figure out what the user *really* wants. In this case, the OP is apparently too lazy to type chevrons?
Q: I can't do this one specific thing.
A: I can implement that one specific thing for you. Next?
"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 TheRaven on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:39PM
No, that's not what he's saying. He's saying that he wants to be able to type in a markup language that is designed for humans to type, rather than one that is designed to be machine generated. He points out that his preferred markup language doesn't support nice syntax for everything that HTML supports, for example horizontal rule, but that most of what it doesn't support is irrelevant for a site like Soylent. i.e. adding hr is precisely the opposite of what he actually wants.
I'd second the vote for Markdown, by the way, with a preference for GitHub flavoured Markdown [github.com], which anyone that has used GitHub is likely to be familiar with.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:53PM
Honestly, there've been a couple times I really wished we had <hr> available, when I had both a direct reply, and a long semicoherent tangential ramble, and wished to clearly delineate them so sane people new when to stop reading. Or if I'm writing a big long post with footnotes, to clearly delineate footnotes from paragraphs. I just ended up using a line of -------------------- or ***************** or some such, but an <hr> would have been nicer.
Guess I should submit a feature request on github in a few weeks, once the devs have cooled off from this commenting business.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:27AM (4 children)
How about Asciidoc [asciidoctor.org]? It wasn't created by a prominent Apple fanboy so it's not as well-known, but it's mature — predating markdown by a couple years, in fact — more consistent, has actual conformance tests [asciidoc.org], and isn't "abandoned" and forked a million ways. It also has more formatting options available. I think we'd only need a subset, though, because the full asciidoc spec would be overkill.
Also, I agree about it being opt-in, at least for existing accounts. People's existing settings should never be changed unless there's a damn good reason for it. However, changing the default for ACs and newly created users is fair game. Make a new account, get the new default; use an account that predates the change and nothing changes.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @07:30AM (3 children)
Which has no real user-facing advantages and nobody knows it. Cool, eh?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:10PM (1 child)
He does point out in his other comment about asciidoc that it uses the conventional _italic_ and *bold* conventions, whereas markdown uses weird *italic*/_italic_ and **bold**/__bold__, so that looks like a real user-facing advantage to me, but the reality is that, like VHS, markdown won (presumably because of ascii-pr0n?), so now everyone's using it regardless of merit.
If I were doing my own documentation for a project, I'd seriously consider asciidoc, but for a commenting system meant to be used by thousands of random people, popularity beats technical merit.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday March 01 2017, @08:23PM
There's actually quite a few user-facing advantages; if you're interested, check my reply to that AC [soylentnews.org]. That's not everything, since I was trying to limit it to things that I think could be useful in a comment system, but I think there's enough benefit that it would be worth at least considering it for its merits instead of just going with the PHP of lightweight markup. Also, there's enough similarity that people familiar with markdown should be able to use it without any major troubles. All you'd need is a cheat sheet link to some basic formatting symbols and you'd be good to go.
I'll admit I prefer asciidoc, because Markdown has enough inconsistencies and annoyances that I started preferring to use adoc instead of md where possible, but I don't have any strong preference for use here, because I think either one would be an improvement over our current options. I only mentioned Asciidoc as a possible alternative because of the remark about Markdown's fragmentation and issues with its undefined behaviour, and the possibility that it might be easier to implement a parser for the parts of it that would be relevant for commenting.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday March 01 2017, @08:07PM
Which has no real user-facing advantages and nobody knows it. Cool, eh?
Just because you don't know it doesn't mean nobody does. It's used for the git documentation [github.com], O'Reilly accepts it for books, and Github accepts it for documentation, READMEs, etc. as well as Markdown.
As for user-facing advantages for asciidoc over markdwon, here are a few:
* Using _ for italic and * for bold makes more sense than * and **, and makes bold+italic (_*foo*_) both shorter and clearer
* Superscript (^foo^) and subscript (~foo~) are explicitly defined in asciidoc, but not in Markdown.
* Support for horizontal rule with triple single-quote (''')
* Checklists with [*] syntax
* Link syntax is both simpler and less likely to result in parsing errors. asciidoc links are in form of example.com[Link Text] whereas Markdown uses [Link Text](example.com), which causes problems when a URL has parentheses in it. Having to manually replace parens with %28 and %29 in Wikipedia links is annoying with Markdown, for a real example of why this matters.
* Code blocks are marked by a matching line of dashes (such as ----) at the beginning and end of the block, whereas Markdown uses 4 spaces on each line. That means you have to change the actual code blocks to suit Markdown, but with Asciidoc you can dump the code without modification. The spec also explicitly defines a syntax for syntax highlighting, if needed, but in Markdown it's non-standard.
* Passthrough blocks (++++) allow selective embedding of HTML in cases where you need direct control
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:11AM (1 child)
Heard. No idea how long it'll be though. Bitcoin payment rewrite is the first thing on the slate for a minor update a month or two from now then fixing other bugs. Adding features isn't likely to happen before the end of the summer at the earliest. Unless we start paying me to put in five eight hour days a week, I'm not going to once we're finished polishing the current update.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:17AM
While I'm on board with the idea of using allowing another type of formatting mode vs. the all-or-nothing "html or not" options we have now, I'd argue that AsciiDoc [wikipedia.org] would be a better choice to implement. It has similarities to Markdown in that it's a human-readable format that is used to apply markup, but unlike Markdown it's a more reliable format because it has a stricter standard and even has conformance tests [asciidoc.org].
It's also generally more sane to parse, I believe. For example, asciidoc uses _foo_ for italics and *foo* for bold, whereas Markdown's ridiculous design is to use *foo* for italics and **foo** for bold. There's a quick reference [asciidoctor.org] for an idea of what sort of things you can do with full asciidoc support.
Full asciidoc support would be overkill, but a useful subset of its formatting rules could be really good for commenting.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:06AM
As a workaround you could use ham-mode [github.com] for emacs, coupled with Firefox's "It's All Text" addon. IAT adds a button to let you edit textarea input in an external editor and updates the textarea when you save the temporary file, and ham-mode in emacs lets you write markdown and it auto-converts to HTML on save. When combined you can write your comments in markdown but get HTML that renders mostly like you'd expect.