Journal CmdrTaco's Journal: Flat Mode Discussions 13
The issue is about the use of Flat/Threaded/Nested modes. D2 cleanly replaces both threaded and nested modes- you effectively get nested mode by bringing the 2 sliders together. And threaded mode is vastly more flexible because you can choose the level at which comments are abbreviated or displayed in full text. So users of those modes should be set (obviously there are other reasons not to use D2, I'm just talking about the layouts here tho)
What's left is flat mode, which has a number of sort options. Now flat mode is used by roughly 4% of our active population. When i think about flat mode, I think about 2 reasons you would have to use it:
- I hate indenting and whitespace. I want a big vertical column now this isn't my bag, but I can understand it and even consider supporting it in D2. I think you sacrifice legibility, but this is a personal preference. It also would be easy to support in D2. Hell, you could probably do it in a greasemonkey script no problem.
- It's easier to remember your place in flat mode This to me is the only reason to use flat mode- you can reload your page an hour later, find the last comment you read, and pick up where you left off.
Now I Would think that the only reason to use flat mode is #2... except that only a couple hundred Slashdot readers have the 'ignore threads' sort order enabled. So either they don't understand what they are doing, or #1 above is the real reason that they use flat mode.
So in a nutshell, the question I am asking in this journal is 'Why do you use flatmode?' Is it cosmetic? To more easily keep your place in a discussion? Something I'm just missing? We have plans to implement a read/unread state retention for discussions, so maybe would you migrate to a threaded view if that function exists? Or is it purely aesthetic... an irrational hatred of scrollbars and whitespace?
The reason this matters is that simply formatting the page flatly is easy. Probably a simple greasemonkey hack or maybe a few lines of CSS. But re-implementing the alternate sort is gonna take some work. And I'm ok with that... except that the logs say that nobody actually USES that sort... they ONLY are using flat mode for the cosmetic reasons.
Speak out! Stay on-topic or you WILL be moderated down.
why i've used flat mode (Score:2)
It's easier to follow chronologically. If I can click something right at that moment that would flip the sort order (newest-> oldest, or the reverse) that'd be even better. I tend to - if I don't have a lot of time, I'll read new->old. If I have time, and/or maybe mod points, then I'll read old->new and keep the mod points in mind and try to read all of them.
A flat list, with the ability to abbreviate some of the lower-modded w/ the slide bar that exists alread
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It would be cool if the toggle could happen without a reload but I suspect that the # of readers who would actively change from a flat to a threaded view dynamically from one discus
Flat Mode (Score:1)
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What that says to me is that if we indicated which comments you have already read, your needs would be met, because your needs are mostly about making sure that your comment is the best it can be, which requires all the context you can get. You don't care about reading comments sequentially in any particular order, you just want to ma
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Similar to when you submit a bug to some project trackers, when you preview it'll give suggestions to any existing that might be a dupe.
Or, you could even have a search button in the More | Prefs { Reply that would put a popup box for subject/m
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Hi tf23, good to see you around :)
Matching similar posts turns out to be a really hard problem. Not the searching, but the deciding on search terms. What qualifies as an unusual word or phrase in what you're typing that would make a good search term?
The "similar stories" hack I threw together years ago does this for stories, basically starting with a huge stoplist and then identifying "unusual but not unique" words from a large corpus. It works amazingly well, which is to say, it sucks big time. It comes
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I understand what you are saying wrt searching the comments. However, what about matching what's in the new-comment subject towards other comments subjects && body?
Yes, it relies upon people choosing appropriate comment subjects. But if one were to do a match against it, mysql already filters out common words. If nothing mat
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I think the timer on the Submit a key improvement (Score:2)
When posting a series of one-liners, the former round trip "slow down, partner" (or whatever that was) was 87 kinds of tedious.
Thank you.
A few things that have bothered me. (Score:1)
Second, occasionally I've noticed that not all comments of a certain
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