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...
...We get IE functionality soon. Its pretty hypocritical not to considering the majority of slashdot users are against people developing IE only sites. Its also quite a stretch for me to get FF on my work computer. I'm sure the case is the same with many slashdotters.
As a follower of firefox since day 1, reading that in a place as big as slashdot really made a tear drop.
ok, the little control box either needs to be movable, or on the right hand side where it'll be less likely to cover text. It makes a big part of the screen useless as it is now.
It's not "hypocritical" to shoot for standards-compliant markup, and neglect quirky pieces of software that ignore the standards.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
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!
do {print "Mini-Geek Rules!\n";}
until ($TheEndOfTheWorld);
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!
I'm not sure what is supposed to happen, but there's no way to adjust threshold and the floating window is just annoying.
I'm using the lastest weekly, 8573.
Opera are pretty good at fixing bugs promptly if you let them know. Use the form if you don't have other contacts:
https://bugs.opera.com/wizard/
Why is the size of the "Read more .. " presented in bytes?
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!!"
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
D'oh. Looks like they've added it already. Certainly wasn't there last time I had mod points.
My spoon is too big.
I was using the new comments beta system until yesterday. I turned it off because it sucks ass. I see the potential, but it's annoying as shit right now. I know, that's not a very constructive criticism...but, damn. Speed is an issue, the stupid floating "full, hidden, blah blah blah" shit on the left pane, and whatnot.
Maybe after they work out some of the speed issues and the like, it'll be great. But for now, it can't touch "-1, Nested, Highest Scores First" comment browsing.
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.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
The moderation-in-place has come in particularly handy. Many times I'd moderate something, then wait until I'd read down the rest of the page to hit "save", but forget to hit it.
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.
First, I'd like to know what exactly is wrong with Opera's Javascript implementation that D2 can't be made to work with it - especially Opera 9, I think somebody just couldn't be bothered.
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.
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I've been using D2 for a few weeks now, and although it's occasionally doing things that surprise me, I've grown to like it a lot.
I used to have to open hidden thread responses in a separate tab; now I can just display them inline. That change alone is worth any pain with the new system.
I noticed inline moderation yesterday too. That surprised me, and I'm not certain I like it - I used to go through an entire discussion and moderate, then check whether I'd tried to moderate more or less posts than I had mod points. If I'd gone over-budget I could then prioritise the use of the mod points. The inline moderation means that once I've selected a moderation, it's used. It's also less forgiving of accidental selection in the drop-down.
The other issue I've noticed is that for very large discussions (700+ posts) Firefox can report that processing the Javascript has taken too long. I get offered the choice of cancelling processing the script, or continuing. Once I'd realised what was causing this and just started hitting 'continue' it hasn't prevented the site working properly, just irritated me. But the performance modifications will probably resolve that.
Inline replies sound good - I'll welcome that.
Overall, given the choice, even with the existing implementation and its occasional flaws, I like it, and I'd prefer to keep it to the old discussion format.
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.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
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.
I'll still use the site when the new version is available in IE. Ironically, because of personal preference (i.e. choice). I've tried the latest version's of FF, and Opera and I still think websites look best in IE. I don't knock those who like those browsers, but the way I see it, a standard does not need an independant group. That may sound lame to some, but I've invested a lot of time and money in building my MS developer skillset. In addition, seeing as my family, nor my friends, have ever had a major problem with MS software and tools, I don't see to the need to change course...yet.
That being said, I'll keep my copy of FF around and periodically look at Slashdot and other various sites, but to be perfectally honest, I think its font rendering systems and layout is ugly (too block'ish') for my taste.
Regards,
MBC1977,
(US Marine, College Student, and Good Guy!)
Regards,
MBC1977,
Given the # of people who are only allowed to use IE when they're at work, if /. stops working w/ IE, productivity should skyrocket.
[o]_O
I read fast. I show all comments. When I enabled the new discussion system I had to tweak my preferences some to enable it to do what I had before.
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I would like specific markup and a decent CSS style (maybe user configurable) to quote messages.
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!
Ok, so you're using a global variable called comments; a "hash" indexed by comment ID. Except it's just an object to JS, and you're telling it to create numeric elements in it... these elements are not just array indexes, they're also method names, and numeric method names.. well, they're a Bad Idea.
... } do comments = { 'c[cid]': ... }. Now instead of comments.1234567, you're asking for comments.c1234567. Now in comments.js, replace comments[cid] with comments['c'+cid]. Now changing the threshold works just fine.
With 2 search and replace operations, I have the basics of Discussion2 working in Opera 9.01 on a locally saved page:
First, instead of doing comments = { [cid]:
What does "D2" do that the Slashdotter extension doesn't do? I'm perfectly happy with that.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
There are a myriad of other features I would like. The ability to sort was a key feature for me in the classic display, and this new display could have vastly more power on things like that. (For example, sorting by probable association, so if there are multiple threads discussing the same thing, they are together.) You are limited on server-side processing, as it's time-critical - you're serving 100,000 users (the same circulation as a national newspaper), so powerful server-side features can be a real headache. With that kind of userbase, it's much better for the server to just update an index of probable keywords and deliver that to the client to do any further processing or sorting.
That, to me, is an important tool. Information is useless if it's so scattered that it takes more effort to collate it than to learn it from scratch. The ideal would be to be able to instruct the browser to recursively go through the related articles listed at the top and pull those indexes as well, so that users have the power to view the history and background of a discussion across multiple articles. (It won't prevent rehashing, which is inevitable, but it may encourage people to move further in their thoughts than is otherwise likely to happen.)
What has always made Slashdot exciting is that it has dared to challenge conventional wisdom on how news works - even the UK's Guardian newspaper cites Slashdot as the inspiration behind the blogs attached to articles, and the BBC's user moderation system is very likely a derivative of the system we all love and use. It's experimented with presentation, filtering, tagging, cross-referencing and windsurfing. The new front-end provides a thick-client interface, with all the possibilities that implies. All that power (Power! POWER! And it's even better than an IBM POWER! Bwahahahahahahaha!)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
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.
not that anyone ever actually bothers to contribute anything more than ideas and complaints
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....
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
What the hell are you talking about? The server side is working fine, thousands of people are using it. There is no magic that needs to happen on the server, its still just plain old http requests and responses. Client side compatability wouldn't need to wait anyways, since OTHER PEOPLE ALREADY DID IT FOR YOU. Why is this hard to grasp? They didn't write a webserver, cause one already existed. So why write an AJAX lib when dozens already exist and are better? You are saying that they should make worse code, take longer to do it, and have it not work. Why, what is good about that?
These are not stupid or uneducated people. They use Firefox at home. If they hit Slashdot from work, they're likely to be doing it via IE.
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.
You can't click "Preferences" at the top of this page (or any other page on the site)? Then click "Comments" to edit the comments prefs? Then click "Discussion Style" -> "Normal"? Then "Save"?
I see no reason why any of that should crash IE. I disbelieve (especially since I just tried it and it worked in IE 7.0.5346.5 Beta 2). If this really did make IE "blow up," then please tell me the version/build of IE you are using, and the exact steps you took, and I'll try it out.