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CmdrTaco (1)

CmdrTaco
  malda&slashdot,org
http://cmdrtaco.net/

I have powers. Secret powers.

Journal of CmdrTaco (1)

Keybindings in Discussion2

[ #187365 ]
Friday November 09 2007, @11:47AM
User Journal
Since this is not yet documented, I figured I would mention this here now... we are experimenting with some very rudimentary keystroke navigation in the discussion2 system. We support both FPS style WASD keybindings, as well as the standard vi layout of HJKL. Down/Up will cycle you through next/previous comment chronologically... left/right will cycle you through next/previous in thread order. Holding SHIFT down while you press the navigation key will collapse the previous comment. And when you get to the end, pressing down or right will attempt to retrieve more comments if you want them.

What this means is that you can now use D2 to simulate most of the most popular viewing modes of the original discussion system. By dragging both the abbreviate & display sliders right next to each other you effectively remove abbreviated comments which simulates nested mode. By toggling comment retrieval order to 'Oldest First' and using up down, you can effectivel read the discussion from oldest to newest. And of course the default settings gives you the best comments first, providing a nice default view of discussions for most anonymous users (who rarely participate and we want to really show only the best comments).

You can also disable D2 in the comment prefs (the word 'prefs' in the floating dialog box) if you are logged in. Right now we're testing D2 for a large percentage of anonymous readers. As soon as we finish IE7 support we'll roll out D2 for the rest of the ACs.

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  • So far I'm liking all the d2 changes very much. However, when I click on prefs in the left "HUD" that controls the slider et all, I only see "date/score" in the "Comment Retrieval Order" pulldown here on Slashdot. You mention 'Oldest First' being there. M
    • Yeah the wording on those boxes was supposed to be changed for this code refresh but apparently that didn't make the cut... the retrieval order is either 'highest score first' or 'oldest comment first'.
  • by jomas1 (696853) on Friday November 09 2007, @12:03PM (#21295381) Homepage
    Vi navigation is cool but j seems to select the previous comment and k selects the next comment. Shouldn't this be reversed?
    • I musta brain farted. We'll get it switched around soon. The functionality on left/right is sketchy too, but we're just waiting for people to try it out a bit... we've never tried any of this and have no idea what makes the most sense... also note that
  • They're quite annoying for those of us who tend to randomly tap their keyboards while reading an article... :(
  • Keybindings are a very good idea!

    What about making all these keys configurable, especially for those who do not use US keyboards? That would be the extra icing on the cake...

    • Quite frankly with all of my design changes in the last few years, I've aimed to *remove* the more under utilized configuration options on Slashdot. For a few years we added every feature we thought would be interesting, and after a decade we've learned t
  • Is this getting only X comments at a time thing permanent? If so is there any way to get all comments in one go? If I read an article I'll either want to read only a couple of comments or all of them at once rather than having to keep clicking on more comm
    • Logged in users can up the default number in the preferences, and subscribers have an 'All' button. I'm evaluating the effectiveness of this decision- I know it's annoying to some people, but under the old system you had to click page 2... page 3... page
      • Up until a couple of days ago it was loading every comment whenever I went to an article under the new system, so it was definitely possible.
        • The new code hoses the CPU while it's downloading as well, Firefox is taking 99.99% and is totally unresponsive. I know a lot of that is due to it's crappy Javascript threading, but it's now taking as long to download 50 comments as it was to download 500
          • I'd question your 50=500 comment, but I definitely agree that performance is lacking. Thats part of why the size is small... on a slower computer, 200-300 comments is unusable (note that on my laptop, performance is quite comfortable even on several hund
            • Doesn't the Prototype library (which it looks like you're using for AJAX) use JSON by default rather than XML? But either way I agree there's no easy solution to Firefox's crappy JS implementation :(

              Last time I looked at Slashcode it was version 1.somethin