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posted by martyb on Tuesday February 28 2017, @05:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the reset-button dept.

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

 
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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.
  • (Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:01PM (16 children)

    by Appalbarry (66) on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:01PM (#472916) Journal

    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.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:15PM (2 children)

    by DECbot (832) on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:15PM (#472930) Journal

    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)

      by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:29PM (#472943) Homepage Journal

      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

        by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:26PM (#472979)

        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)

    by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:16PM (#472932) Homepage Journal

    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)

      by cmn32480 (443) <reversethis-{moc.liamg} {ta} {08423nmc}> on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:46PM (#472958) Journal

      /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

        by CoolHand (438) on Tuesday February 28 2017, @08:14PM (#473004) Journal

        /me goes and cries in a corner 'cuz nobody loves us

        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)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:33PM (#472984) Journal

    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)

      by paulej72 (58) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:47AM (#473169) Journal

      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)

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @07:12AM (#473233) Journal

        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

          by paulej72 (58) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @11:53AM (#473266) Journal

          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

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:49PM (#472993) Journal

    PS Thank you as well for not enabling emojis and avatars.

    Lol wut 😂😂😂😂😂😂👌

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:49PM (1 child)

    by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:49PM (#472994) Journal

    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

      by Appalbarry (66) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:28AM (#473181) Journal

      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)

    by romlok (1241) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:50PM (#473345)

    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

    • , but a quick fix would be to add a space before and/or after each separator.
    • (Score: 2) by romlok on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:55PM (1 child)

      by romlok (1241) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:55PM (#473349)

      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

        by paulej72 (58) on Thursday March 02 2017, @02:31AM (#473685) Journal

        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