Journal CmdrTaco's Journal: Discussion2 Notes 18
- you can turn it off if you log in. Some people get stuck in there ways, and no matter what we build it will never make you happy. So you can have the old lame system and we'll all enjoy the new cool system without you.
- you can get 'nested' mode back by dragging the 2 thresholds together in the floating slider. they connect and become a single thing. it's quite nifty, and if you are logged in the setting is remembered so you don't have to click to navigate deep threads.
- you can get more comments at once from the 'prefs' link. the default is currently 50, but choosing 'many' changes that (currently) to 250, which means you will get roughly the average number of comments in a typical slashdot story. Yes you will need to click 'more' on a huge discussion, but at that point we're talking about very large pages and slower computers like to choke on huge pages anyway so we have to balance size and performance.
there are 2 huge wins here for everyone... the first is retention of context. You can wade into a thread, retrieve more comments, change your threshold, all without losing your place like you did in the old system. And using the WASD keys to navigate makes it very easy to peruse discussions in a number of interesting ways. mouseover the help text in the floater for more information about how they work. We're open to suggestions on how this should work- i'm not totally happy with it yet... but it *is* possible to mash a single key and go from start to end of a discussion, which pleases me.
the second is that the default users see the highest score comments first. You can change this by logging in and toggling the retrievable order to oldest first, but for most people this means that the first comments they see will be the best. There are so many great comments on Slashdot, but most users don't see them because they are buried within the discussion. I think this goes a long ways towards helping.
A final word about the ads in there- unfortunately there are ads in the new system. Changing from a static page-page-page system to a dynamic ajax system with a single 'page load' causes us to serve hundreds of thousands of fewer ads. We worked out roughly how long people read discussions and are trying to strike a balance so that you see roughly the same number of ads under this system as you would have under the old one. We'll tweak it of course, but we gotta pay the bills here people!
And obviously all of this is a work in progress. Pudge is leading development work on this. The next project is to make it possible to post without losing your place in the discussion, and then to refine navigation keybindings and thread expansion/contraction controls to make the whole UI clean. We appreciate constructive criticisim. There are bugs (especially in IE, but almost no slashdot user runs IE) but we're mashing them out- thanks for your feedback on them. As we sand off the rough edges I think you'll all find the new system a vast improvement if you just play with it for a bit and give it a fair chance. Not all change is bad
I've Noticed More Fluidity To The System (Score:1)
Regards
~RWS
Re: (Score:3)
the ultimate plan is that the firehose can 'generate' an index that looks almost exactly like the old index... but with a few nice extra features (like iPhone support for example). As the dust settles, the 2 code bases merge, and while the end user may not notice (except for a few minor feature additions) it'll just sorta trans
"Newest first" for moderating? (Score:2)
This week I have made the move over to D2, but I think when I have moderator points I will have to switch back over.
I feel like ther
Re: (Score:3)
Sorry to ask a stupid question, (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Not going to switch yet (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
'Flat' mode could probably be replicated in CSS somehow. It's not really in the TODO list since the plan is to use keybindings for alternate sort orders of comments. That might change, but we want to get things 100% done before we start monkeying things up again.
Can't get it to work right (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
play with the thresholds. You probably can't exactly mimic the precise functionality of what you're looking for, but you should be able to get close.
The upside
Sorry, still hate it (Score:2)
That, I do like. I had occasion to browse
all without losing your place like you did in the old system.
Maybe it's because I'm finally old-school, but I surf better than I do most things in life these days, and, contrary to public belief, Slashdot, is not the most difficult website to have to navigate around out there.
Also, my thresholds are pretty low and my
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Fair enough.
overrated/underrated for example
Glad to hear it. Just got hit with it yesterday...
tagging system
Yeah, I was just messing around with it this week, and it's definitely a different way of finding articles.
Thanks for the answers.
The improvements are substantial (Score:2)
Not arguing the requirement to space things out, but I've made several quick replies and had some fail, without me being conscious as I tab around and do stuff.
Suggestions:
Slashdot remains fun, and I thank you.
Re: (Score:3)
Social Computing Research (Score:2)
I have seen it take upwards of 2 minutes plus. Or maybe just reduce the total number of script blocks. A typical comment thread has around 9.
Of these, it looks like only one is dynamic, can you just set up a cron job to ret