Slashdot Discussion2 In Beta 421
The primary reason for discussion2 was to get beyond the pain in the ass that is navigating large discussion threads on Slashdot. You know the problem: once threads get deep, you have to click repeatedly, waiting for tabs to load. Or even when you encounter a long comment, you have to wait to get the full comment text.
Cool Things D2 Does Now
- Allows you to change your threshold, open and close threads, and expand long comments in place, without ever loading a new page.
- Allows you to moderate a comment without clicking a save-button that loses your place in a thread.
- A new, more intuitive user interface that more clearly displays the nature of comment thresholds.
- Vastly Improved threaded view that allows you to see more of the discussion in less space, without clutter.
Some items on the TODO list (more or less in order of priority)
- Make it Progressive - Right now D2 simply gets all the comments in a discussion. This sucks. We need to write a task to retrieve only appropriate comments. So if you are at Score:4 threshold, we don't bother retrieving the full text of all comments at Score:-1. And even better, if someone moderates or posts a comment, we need to update the page you are reading to reflect those changes. Again, the goal here is that once you load a page, you don't need to close it until you are done with the discussion. This actually has MANY subtle problems, like how do you notify a user when a thread 10 pages up has been replied to.
- Make it Fast Actually I think solving #1 will mostly solve #2 at the same time. Since right now we get the full discussion, we are getting WAY to much data. We need to get say 50 comments at a time, not all 1000. This will give your browser time to catch up and make the whole thing "Feel" faster. Right now, on my machine a 200-300 comment page is very usable, but to much larger and it starts slowing down. This is all machine dependent. I'm sure there are good javascript tricks that would help improve performance.
- In-Place Posting You should be able to post a comment without reloading a page. Right now you can just open a tab, but then you are looking at a stale discussion. This isn't that hard either- especially once we finish #1. Just need to open the reply page in a div, and when you save, make sure that the new comment is properly retrieved and inserted into the thread. But there's some subtle stuff here like how to handle previews. We need to change some of our error handling- the current system uses previews as an opportunity to warn readers about things that are "Wrong" about their comment. We need to figure out how to do that without launching new pages. It's not hard, but it'll take some time.
- Compatibility ok so Opera's broken Javascript implementation won't work unless they fix their browser, but we'd like to make at least IE work for the trivial percentage of Slashdot readers forced to use IE by their corporate overloads. But since 2/3rds of you use Firefox, fixing IE is just not at the top of my priority list... I'd rather make it work better for the majority. And as every web developer knows, cross browser platform compatibility can be a real bitch. But before we are out of beta, it probably would be nice to get IE functional, if only for other websites using our source code that actually have IE as the dominant population.
- Smooth out the UI there are a lot of parts to this problem. Right now the threshold change is buttons but it should actually be draggable, I'd like the widget to toggle from the top to the side, but need to build a horizontal version of the widget. The expansion/contraction of comments and threads have weird functionality that could be improved- for example there is a difference between expanding a comment and expanding a thread. And there's new concepts like expanding a child vs expanding an entire thread vs expanding "Siblings" vs expanding hidden children vs visible children. These are very interesting user interface questions that we'll start working out soon.
- Rethink What Old Functionality By this I primarily mean discussion filters and ordering. By default D2 uses a thread ordered, chronological display. The old system had many other sort modes, but I'm not how sure how effective these are once threaded. So I may simply leave the old system in place for users who want to see a flat discussion ignorant of threads ordered by date or score. Since this is only a tiny percentage of users, I figure it can wait.
Conclusion
A lot of the stuff you see in D2 is just javascript you can easily play with yourself. We haven't mangled it or anything so you js haxx0rz are welcome to submit patches for interesting ideas. We don't have a backend for progressive rendering, but there are a LOT of features that we want to implement that wouldn't even require you to touch the perl. Of course if you're willing to hack perl, it's all up on the website not that anyone ever actually bothers to contribute anything more than ideas and complaints, but it sure never hurts to ask!
Already around 13,000 of you are using Discussion2. We're a ways off from flipping a switch to make it the default for everyone, but it's already substantially better for users with fast computers and Firefox. Hopefully in a few more weeks it will be good enough for everyone. Thanks for the help along the way. We hope you like the new system... I sure do. And mad props to Nate & Pudge for their work on this...
hopefully... (Score:5, Insightful)
get out of the way! (Score:5, Insightful)
Define hypocrisy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:hopefully... (Score:3, Insightful)
Any site that is developed solely for IE, with that justified because "only 10% use something else" would be loudly decried here.
So because of the stupid policies of the the place where I work, I'm not important. Thanks Taco. Don't go into marketing.
Re:hopefully... (Score:5, Insightful)
I completely agree with you though if they said they were never going to develop it for IE.
Re:IE not so important... (Score:5, Insightful)
How many visitors on Slashdot per day? I wanna see these statistics. If they only had 8 users, a quarter of them would be insignificant. If they really have millions of hits per day from hundreds of thousands of users, then 25% is enough to start a riot.
However, it's Slashdot, so I guess such a riot would never happen, it's still crazy to say "only a quarter of our users will be broken"
Off topic question about "Read more .." (Score:5, Insightful)
To me this is a meaningless measurement that conveys no real information. Are we talking single or multi-byte characters? Does that include line terminators? Does it include HTML formating?
IMHO the number of words is a more beneficial stat. Or is the use of the number of bytes meant to be a throw-back to a "cutesy" geek secret club of "I know so I am 1334!!"
Re:Disgusting! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody is being thrown away - IE users simply have a worse experience of the site but they can still read the articles and participate in the discussions.
I'm pretty happy with it (Score:5, Insightful)
The flip side of that is that I don't get to say, "Hey, here was a better way of saying the same thing." The mod point's gone. It's common for me to think, "This was a correct and useful answer, but impolite" and prefer to wait until I found a more polite way of phrasing the same information. If I don't find one, though, the correct answer is sometimes worth modding up if the question is important.
The box for setting viewing levels was kind of hard to get used to, but I think I finally understand it. "Down" doesn't mean "less of this"; it means "expand to take up some of the territory covered by the other box." If they change its behavior, I'd have to learn it all over again, and it makes sense once you've figured out what all of the arrows mean.
All in all I've been using D2 and sticking with it.
Re:hopefully... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Define hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW, anyone know if IE7 fixes these problems? I've lost track of when Vista's coming out (as I really don't care that much) but if IE7 has a better Javascript stack and most people get it at launch, this might be a moot point.
Opera, and.. it was crap (Score:4, Insightful)
Second, I tried D2 a while ago (I'm not a subscriber though, I guess some non-subscribers got the opportunity too), and I didn't like it much. Slow, slow, slow and did I mention slow.
Re:Doesn't work with IE or Opera (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the server side.
Ajax isn't some magic spice you can just download and sprinkle into your web code to somehow make it suddenly non-stateless. You need to rethink your whole comment/posting model and then design the interface and interaction between server and browser based on that.
Dojo and Mochikit are little more than pretty widgets to look at (with some liberal use of xmlhttprequest, which doesn't mean jack unless your backend is already structured to use it).
So yeah. Typical slashdot response.
Thresholds not obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
It takes a little more thought than I'd like to put in to see how the thresholds are defined. 4 Full (score 5) / 51 Abbreviated (score 2) / 27 hidden (score -1) would be appreciated.
Being able to disable the abbreviated option altogether would be nice, actually. Then I could navigate threads at my leisure.
Also, a flexible threshold system would be good, but now we're going into divining magic. For example, if I click on a thread, I'm obviously interested in it; hide -1 scored comments, show comments scoring 0 or more.
Re:Define hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
End-users who choose to stick with a non-standards-compliant browser cause extra work for web developers. This is less than optimal, because it causes fewer features to be developed slower.
The problem is that end-users are the only ones in a position to change this. However, end-users usually have no idea that they're causing a lot of extra work to be done. One good solution to fix this is to develop for standards-compliant browsers first, and fix other issues later (which makes more sense purely from a development standpoint as well).
Re:Instant Moderation Please! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Define hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
Hm, it's the market leader and it blows off the standards and actually occasionally undermines them actively.
I have some options as to how to deal with that. 1) Throw up my hands and say "dang, I just gotta play ball". This, by the way, requires a good deal of extra expense as I develop the code forks etc. that allow my site to play ball. 2) Save myself that extra headache and use the (considerable) leverage my traffic affords me to see if others will start to notice this problem.
Don't go into marketing, Taco. Stay in the tech field.
Re:How do I UN-collapse threads? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have the opposite problem. How do I get "the old "Flat" view" mode? I'm interested in maximizing the number of words on my screen, and minimizing the number of mouse clicks.
From TFA:
What makes Slashdot so great is that I can pop open a tab with 100 - or even 5 tabs of 100 posts each - and simply skim the entire discussion, without having to do any navigation more complicated than hitting PgDn every few seconds.
If I have to move a mouse and click on every one of 100 messages, or even 10 seperate subthreads, I'm not going to bother reading any of it.
The fact that I can expand a thread without a page load is cool -- but the fact that I have to expand threads without a page load isn't a feature -- it's a bug. Seriously -- if I can expand a comment/thread with a mouseclick but without a page load, then it means my browser has every word of the entire discussion sitting in RAM, and your UI is getting in the way of the user experience because it's preventing my browser from rendering it.
Re:Define hypocrisy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Off topic question about "Read more .." (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Instant Moderation Please! (Score:3, Insightful)
But I agree that moderation is something that should be done thoughtfully, and being able to give someone literally instant Karma, is going to lead to a lot more Unfair Metamoderation.
Re:Doesn't work with IE or Opera (Score:2, Insightful)
You're telling me that the server has a problem with IE?
> Dojo and Mochikit are little more than pretty widgets
Spoken by someone who has clearly never looked at either toolkit. In fact, Mochikit is rather lacking in pretty widgets, having focused on things like remoting instead.
> So yeah. Typical slashdot response.
Indeed. What the hell qualifies you to lecture me?
Re:IE not so important... one more thing :) (Score:3, Insightful)
Right now, there is blockquotes and italics. Italics don't look as good since the change to sans serif font, and blockquotes are a little more difficult to work with and to me the lighter grey blockquote font color makes the comment more silent in my head vs italics (kinda like parenthesized stuff is more quiet then non-parenthesized text). Bold is loud and/or important! AND CAPS ARE LOUDER!
Re:Define hypocrisy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Define hypocrisy (Score:4, Insightful)
It certainly is hypocritical, especially if those standards are so new (or so poorly implemented in mainstream browsers such as IE) that a large percentage of folks can't use the new version.
Funny, I'm a bit dyslexic and read that as "poorly implemented mainstream browsers such as IE".
Anyway, some of the problems may be use of new-ish standards, but IE also just renders things incorrectly. I sometimes do a small amount of web design-- just HTML and CSS-- and IE there's a lot of CSS that's been around for years that IE just doesn't render properly. Personally, it always made sense to me to write HTML/CSS more or less according to W3C standards and fix up the browser bugs after the fact, when I basically have the thing working. This means it's more likely to work on Gecko and WebKit/KHTML browsers while you're developing, because they adhere closely to the standards.
Add to that the fact that IE users are in the minority on this site, and you can see why IE would be lower priority. Also, IE is a bit of a moving target, since IE7 will (supposedly) render things very differently from either the correct way or the IE6 way of rendering things.
I'm not advocating that /. ceases supporting IE, but it does make sense, given all this, that IE bugfixes would come later. Also, I'll admit that I can understand why lots of developers want to drop IE support altogether. With as much of a headache as it is, there have been times when, during an angry session of trying to get IE to render properly, I've been tempted to say, "Screw it! If any IE users complain, we'll tell them to get a real browser!" I've always changed the site to account for the IE bugs, at least well enough that the site worked OK, but it still annoys me whenever it comes up.
Re:Define hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but NONE of the major browsers are fully CSS2 compliant. So, yes, while IE is the worst of the bunch, dropping IE does not mean that you are writing the range of fully standards-compliant markup. In the end, you're still limited to only using the stuff which happenes to be supported by the browsers you are targeting.
So while IE is the worst, the others are still dirty. Just not so much.
Re:hopefully... (Score:3, Insightful)
Your are right, in that "only 10% use something else" is not a good excuse for developing for just one browser. That is because that reason is unimportant to the issue.
Thing is, this site is designed for FireFox, and Konqueror, and Opera, and Mozilla, and Netscape, and a lot of other little browsers that have like 5 users each.
You see, while in the first case, the page is developed for just one browser to the exclusion of all the others, in this case the page is being developed toward a standard which all browsers are encouraged to follow.
Re:IE not so important... (Score:4, Insightful)
The part you forgot to pick up on was, we're working on it, patches welcome... IMHO not being able to support 1/4 of your users in
a beta testing situation isn't that bad. The point being that if 75% of your users have the potential to give you feedback then you
are going to get a lot of feedback.
And one last point, if IE7 finally gets with the program and complies with standards then maybe it's a good idea to take a wait and
see approach toward supporting IE6.
Personally I for one welcome our new Firefox pushing overlords!
Re:Define hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
Take a few deep breaths out a brown paper bag. They are not shutting out IE users. They are developing first for their main audience while a perfectly capable system is in place for the IE users. No one said that they were going to make their site FireFox only.
Even if they were, so what? Welcome to my life as a Mac user :) It's the price you pay for using a non-mainstream platform...
In any case, take heart in that it doesn't seem to work in my Seamonkey browser, either. I get this weird annoying floater which tells me how many comments are there, but no way that I can work out to increase or decrease my viewing threshold.
Firefox extension: Slashdotter (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How do I UN-collapse threads? (Score:3, Insightful)
You can use the weird little box on the side to get something approximating a flat mode, but it's still got lots of eye candy, but it takes multiple mouse clicks (and Javascript enabled) to get to it. The left margin of the text is still pretty ragged with various threading indentations.
I think the root cause of these UI bugs is that people who write web apps aren't the people who read textual content.
For instance, people who don't spend much time reading (books, web pages, whatever), you probably want to make sure "everything fits on a computer screen, browser maximized, no vertical scrolling"
If you are a chronic reader, that'll give you a headache within 30 seconds. There's a reason why dead-tree books, dead-tree newspapers, and even PDFs and e-books, are oriented portrait-style -- taller vertically than horizontally. And the text is presented in a flat view -- paragraph after paragraph of words, left margin static, right margin ragged.
If you're a web designer, that's unthinkably boring.
If you're a programmer, that's also pretty weird -- because there's a huge amount of information packed into every line of text, and the more you can show on the screen -- both by showing indentation and even highlighting syntax -- is a great idea.
Those models fail when applied to English. There's simply not enough information in the first 30-80 characters of a good post, for instance, to make the Abbreviated mode useful. There's a lot of noise in English. I could have made this point by saying something as short as "English has lots of syntactical sugar" -- but instead I phrased it three or four different ways, figuring that one of them would stick.
The syntactic sugar in English means that it's a language that's great for skimming -- but a skimmable pile of text is something more akin to a book than either an interactive web application, and it's definitely nothing like the code in your editor.
Hence, flat mode FTW. Make the browser look like a big book, use the PgUp/PgDn keys to replace forward/back, and if it's got 300 kilobytes of text, so be it!
My beef with D2 may be with the design -- but my meta-beef is about a design process that started based on an incorrect assumptions about what Slashdot is all about: It's as much a means for reading discussions as it is for having them. I'll even wager that people like us (who post to threads) are in the minority of the /. userbase.
Re:Define hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:IE not so important... (Score:4, Insightful)
Happens all the time to those of us who use Firefox, and it apparently isn't crazy to those coders to say it with a straight face, but it's crazy if IE users get left out in the cold.
Ahahah. Not you in particular but there's a lot of hypocrisy in this here comment page.
Re:Define hypocrisy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Define hypocrisy (Score:4, Insightful)
That well-engineered solutions also offer easy ways to fade in and out content is an effect (pun not intended), not a noteworthy goal in itself. There is a culture among "wanna-be-Web 2.0" sites to do this, and when the functionality is there, it doesn't bug me. Discussion2 in particular offers virtually no effects whatsoever, just a very useful function of reading comments nearly instantaneously with less strain on the server and client. It works exactly how I imagined it would work, and my two complaints is that its JavaScript semantics are somewhat muddled and that CmdrTaco is even for a second *considering* launching it without pitch-perfect IE support.
IE may be ass to code for - trust me, I know. I would rather have 90% of the world use Firefox, Safari or Opera than IE. But IE's JavaScript backend support (excluding debugging facilities) is still fairly good. What's more, not supporting IE because "they only make up a quarter of our visitors" while we were having problems getting Firefox up to the around 10% (+/-4%) worldwide that it has today is nothing less than offensive, a slap in the face of all us who do this for a living and base our "support every browser" argument on the fact that it's the way it should be, not that "our side is better and should be winning". Yes, it's hard work. Suck it up. Make it work. There's no excuse.
Re:Tried it, didn't like it (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, but would using an ALT attribute with, say, "up" or "down" instead of "*" really kill you guys? :)
Re:Can we still get Highest-Ranked- or Newest-Firs (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Define hypocrisy (Score:2, Insightful)
contributing to the project (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps if we heard from Taco about where the project's headed, what's needed, what's wanted. Explicitly point out how people can help (be blatently obvious here). Give people who are willing to develop more of a heads-up about what's around the bend. Maybe a monthly "this is the state of things". There's an entire slashcode-development listserv that is so very desperately underused.
Maybe if Taco started perusing, and posting to that list, it would garner more of the positive support we'd all like to see for the project.
And I mean information related to slashcode, not slashdot. Yes, they are obviously related, but they are not one in the same.
Anyway, that's my suggestion....
Re:Define hypocrisy (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe, perhaps, you just shouldn't be reading Slashdot at work.
Maybe it's a good idea in theory, but in practice, I'll bet most of Slashdot's traffic comes during the US workday. I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia, and I know this is certainly true... the place is almost completely empty on the weekends. I think there's a tendency for HR to hire the smartest people they can get, and then for the company to assign them to jobs that don't require as much education as they've gotten. So people get bored at work...
Re:IE not so important... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, how things have changed
Not so much, no.
Judging the mainstream based on Slashdot is like trying to learn about normal human interaction by people watching at a Star Trek convention.
Re:No. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Tried it, didn't like it (Score:1, Insightful)
Moderate -1, Flamebait, please. (Score:3, Insightful)
Come on people, it's a browser. We computer people tend to lose a great deal by getting stuck on minor issues like what browser people use. There are many very intelligent people who use internet explorer. It's a fact. And they are't even exceptions. The truth is, 90% of functionality is the same. The difference doesn't justify what we make of it.
I'm not hitting on your comment btw. It's just the habit of not seeing the forest because of the trees that i have a problem with.
Anyways, what I really wanted to say: a side effect of this comment system is that it'll favor a lot more comments with a score of 3 or lower. They are the comments usualy hidden by default, and most people who'd read them didn't bother reload. I predict from now on comments will have more meaningful subjects from now on, and a lot less "Re:". Even if a comment is low-rated, if it has an interesting subject it may incline people to click on it.
Re:Define hypocrisy (Score:3, Insightful)