Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Discussion2 In Beta
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.
- 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.
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...
Please for the love of , apply the moderation to a comment as soon as the moderation value has selected from the drop down box. I constantly forget to press the "Moderate" button which is hidden somewhere down the bottom, and therefore comments that I wanted to moderate don't.
Apart from that, it's a vast improvement. Especially being able to selectively browse comments that are below the threshold value, without loosing track of the conversation.
My spoon is too big.
I'm lowly member with a normal account, and I've been able to view the new comment system for like 2 months. Just a minor clarification...
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Normally when I read Slashdot, I read the comments page in nested mode from the top to the bottom. With the new system I have to constantly click to open up the threads which got old real quick. Given that you're loading the whole page anyway, it seems pointless to force me to click expand most of the comment sections.
What I'd really like is an option to have them all expanded by default, but allow me to close the comment blocks on discussions that are obviously going nowhere.
I read the internet for the articles.
So I have to ask ... why is slashdot rolling its own Ajax library? Why not use Dojo or Mochikit or hell, even Prototype? Those do work on every major browser. You already have help from third parties, they wrote the library for you. All you have to do is accept it.
Man, I sound like a born-again or something...
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
I've been using Discussion2 for about 2 weeks now, and I, for one, offer my congradulations. As noted above, it has a few kinks, but overall, it is a vast improvement over the previous layout. I find myself reading much deeper into comments, and the "HUD" makes it easy to see how much time I waste here on /. ;)
Few annoyances I must note, however:
Overall, though, it's a vast improvement over the past system. Keep up the good work!
It also is kind of ironic. The people talking about choice and openess can't even get IE to work with their site. And since it's *only* 25% of the users, it's not a priority.
:)
Its also ironic when we were "fringe" users and used browsers like various gecko based browsers or KHTML based browsers, had something like 10% marketshare and we complained that we ere not a target, nor a priority since 90% of the people used IE.
Wow, how things have changed.
Now, with the slashdot rewrite, I have 2 suggestions, one is old and one is new.
I know it is the desire for slashdot to reward fast over good, and its OK to have the bunches of pirst fost posts and whatnot, but I think its not worth rewarding earlier posts at the same thread level. By that if someone makes a witty one liner that provokes 10-20 good replies, only the top 3 or so good ones are likely to start a new thread. So, I would suggest randomizing the display of posts at any given thread level to increase the deeper threading and discussions vs the arbitrarily rewarding the top ones simply because they smashed the return button faster, yet faster may or may not be better.
Another thing I would suggest is that the message system be a little more sane and/or having more detailed information regarding the moderations to a given post. Right now if you get a message about a reply to one of your posts, you go to a list of them, and then you can either click on the your post or the reply or the article or other options. To me its an unnecessary click to get that info from the second page, and should be on the first (dunno if ad views come into play here or not), but it seems like an unnecessary hit on the DB and extra clicks for nothing. Another thing are the messages regarding moderation. Too many clicks here too, and too much irrelevant info. Some times I have a laundry list of comments that have + this - that, etc, and its easier just to look at my posting history to see what is going on via a summary. I would however like to know the raw data vs a percentage of how many times something has been moderated. Especially when I post something "controversial" and get bunches of + and - mods, but I would like to know if I had 100 + mods and 100 - mods to end up at 0 or if it was 1 + mod and 1 - mod.
Otherwise, I would welcome the expanding of threads with DHTML/layers or whatever makes that happen similar to the tags expansion. Slashdot has grown up over the years like me, but kinda slow like me too
Also, if I look at a discussion once, and then go back to it later, the new stuff is all way at the bottom - it'd be nice to have the option of seeing it at the top.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'd like to see a new/old flag, where "new" is any comments that have been added since my last visit to the article. Also a way to set the threshold to expand only the new comments.