Slashdot Mirror
New Dynamic Updating Discussions
Slashdot users of the Discussion2 system now have a new 'Update' button visible on their floating control slider, as well at the end of the discussion. This button will update your page to include comments posted since the page was loaded, so now you can keep discussion pages up to date without doing a full reload. It's nowhere near complete yet, but it's a nice step that goes a long ways towards making it easier to use larger discussions while they are actively updating. If you aren't using Discussion2, you need to log in, and toggle the checkbox visible on every page. You probably need bother only if you are using Firefox 1.5 or 2.x or Safari. You can send bug reports to me if you want.
Has anyone else noticed pages with comments loading slower than normal? Front page, and my user page seem to load normal, but anytime I click the read more link it seems to take a long time to load. Same for if I try posting or replying to a comment. Side effect of the new comment system?
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
I liked slashdot 1.0. Back then it was like the technology we all loved to talk about. Now it's like politics.
By the way, nice job testing CmdrDildo. Nice 500 errors.
Can you make another button that I can push that will automatically push this button periodically for me?
My initial mental image is that this would simply turn Slashdot a threaded IRC chat vehicle. We all know the quality of discussion online: as it gets faster, it gets worse. Instead of "+1 Insightful", we will need "+1 Merely On Topic." Will moderation changes also be instantly reflected, bringing items in and out of view in real time? How long before you do "fwoop" animations and live character-by-character ajax updates? Imagine the new games the trolls can play.
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Hmm, a helpful and a much faster method to one degree or another.
I don't get it, who wants to read all those comments? Aren't they just failed first post attempts?
(Including this one)
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
I like the Update feature, would it be possible, eventually, to get the main page set up like this too? Just a thought.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
Today, I'd like to inform you about a good programming practice. It's called "Introducing New Features to a High Traffic Web Site in the Middle of the Afternoon on a Weekday".
I'm getting HTTP 503 errors and very bad lag when refreshing pages. How can this be considered an improvement ?? Please revert back to the old system until the bugs are fixed, thanks!
I can throw as many stones as I wish; my house is made of transparent aluminum.
I have "Nested" selected in my user prefs, but with this system the comments are all collapsed and I don't see a "Expand All" (or similar) type button on the comments page, nor in my user prefs (for this new comments format).
Am I missing something, or should I just stick with the "1.0" version of the comments page since "All Expanded - Nested" is the way I prefer for the comments page to load.
Thanx!
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Mod parent +1 On Topic.
Fliches for footwear attack
To any Slashdot users (like myself) who were part of the "University of Michigan" testing group, be aware that Discussion2 was recently silently added as an option in the user preferences. Just go "Preferences" > "Comments" > "Slashdot's New Discussion System Testing".
For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about: A random group of Slashdot users were asked to participate in a study conducted by the University of Michigan on a new comment/discussion interface. This study presumably ended at some point (and possibly the data from it helped create Discussion2). However those users who were subjects in this study had a modified preferences panel, which prevented the Slashdot "Discussion2" mode from being available to us (bug report here). Now they have apparently fixed the issue, though no official message was sent to anyone. So, if anyone else was affected by that bug, you can now test the Discussion2 system along with everyone else.
Thanks to whoever coded the workaround.
You can click on the comment subject to expand the comment. How about a place to click to collapse the comments?
Just remember - if the world didn't suck, we would all fall off.
Thanks, that was my First Laugh (FL) of the day :P
in before vista.
+5, Truth
Oh, the update feature also works in recent khtml browsers (although the bar does not float down the page as you scroll).
I have been reading /. for a long time and never seen this befor. So...
Where is the Info on Discussion2?
(Stike me as a troll, and ding my Karma down again...)
Thats strange. I have never been able to get the new discussion system to work on ie. its great in firefox, but if I enable it home and then come to work where there is only winxp/ie it will be enabled here to and you cant disable it from ie, so I just stick with the normal system.
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XXX#######
There, I said it.
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
checking that box on one page enables the new system for all pages for your account. just dont do it if you ever forsee having to read from ie.
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XXX#######
Well, if you set a correct threshold in your preferences, replies above your threshold should show up opened. There's also a reply button in the infobox on the left for posting a new thread.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
That's what I really want.
A feature of dailykos that I like is that it keeps track of what's new since I last viewed a discussion, even if I close the discussion and re-open it later.
New comments are highlighted in red.
Also, if I reload the equivalent of the Slashdot front page, a topic I've seen before will say "X new comments".
Steal those f*cking features, Taco!
How does this play with the AJAX comments abilities of the Slashdotter Firefox extension?
Mod parent up. There is no way to keep track on threads you didn't participate in. Exactly like I mentioned a couple of weeks ago
If I recall, these are the same shenanigans that crashed Yahoo Pipes.
You have to be careful with recursion!
Maybe it could even abbreviate or hide the posts you've seen before
What?
Anyone else see the irony in Slashdot being Slashdotted?
-- Joren
Yep, same here. Main page loads fine, but comment and reply pages are taking 20 seconds or longer each. I'm surprised I haven't gotten any timeout errors, like someone in another discussion noted.
And I use the low-bandwidth option and a CSS-free browser, which normally has no perceptible lag. But today I just about have to drive stakes to see if it's moving!!
Probably explains why most of today's stories have relatively few comments -- people are getting timed out, or giving up and going away, like I did earlier (couple hours ago, only the main page would load at all; others never did come up no matter how long I waited).
I just hope none of this tinkering breaks slashdot for those of us that want it essentially as plaintext (as one sees in low-bandwidth mode and a CSS-free browser). I can't use the site otherwise; as seen with all the bells and whistles, it makes my eyes bleed.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
now all i need is an update button on the homepage, and i never have to refresh again :)
That's how you create a new post? How intuitive.....
While you guys are at it... sometimes I'm searching for words within the page, since the word is there (but in a collapsed entry) the browser goes to it, but then doesn't highlight it.
I don't seem to have had the problems that others have had. However, when scrolling down the screen then back up, the float box leaves traces of the bottom of the box marking the side panel. Not a huge problem, just weird/bad design.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
What you're asking for has been a feature-request many times for eons with Slashcode. What'd be nice is if you could select the color you want the new comments (or comment-bar of each new comment) coded with in your user prefs.
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
After reading your post, I looked up and down the entire page twice before finding it.
That's after finding it.
Sorry, I see that the Slashdot moderators are moderating criticism of their new system down rather than taking it on board, and expect this comment to be at -1 soon too, but for the love of chocolate eclairs, please make these things more obvious.
I'm still looking for the different view methods as well - seems to be nested by posting time only. Admittedly doing this in Javascript to avoid a page reload could be quite interesting, but it's not exactly new code, the testing option has been available for months so you would expect it to be done by now. I don't know what the Slashdot day jobs are, but if they're full time they do work quite slowly (probably due to the ancient codebase and old cruft that needs to be worked around).
The threshold slider thing, ONCE DISCOVERED, is quite nice - I moved it to the top of the threads rather than in the non-article-related column to the left, and then found out that to make it non-sticky you had to click that little wierd icon on it again. It's also pointless compared to the old drop-down combo-box, but I guess it is prettier, and that's what Web 2.0 is all about, eh?
"That's after finding it." should have been "That's after being told where it is!"
Also, where is my lovely "Top" link when I post a reply?
Just a couple of more features I'd like to see:
* Gmail style reply.. it's a pain to open a new window just to reply.. clicking on [reply to this] should lead to a pulldown textarea where you can reply. kidof like how the current [login] link at the top works. this will end a lot of irritating new-tab-opening.
* This is more of a nit pix.. add a [reply to main article] at the bottom too, so you don't have to scroll all the way up to reply.
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
What I'm missing in the new discussion system is the option to change the comment threshold like in the old system. Now I have to go to the user prefs to change the threshold. Changing the threshold on the comment page is easier, especially when you would like to moderate low scored comments.
I continue to use it largely because I hate the way discussion pages are split up in the old system, but I get essentially no benefit from all the floating control panel nonsense... I just set my thresholds way low so I see everything and skim through it manually with some combination of page downs and text searches.
Tip: if you want to "influence public opinion", you need to post in the first thread, where you'll be stuck fighting with the hired jammers, but if you want to have a reasonable discussion, you should skip waaaay down to the beginning of the second thread.
An actually useful feature would be to randomize the default order in which threads are presented to people, so that first posts would stop having any advantage... but actually fixing the real problems seems to be beyond the scope of interest of our slash-masters. (When was the last time slashdot introduced a new idea? Everything they do seems to be imitating features of other sites...).
I just used up the last of my mod points, then went to a tab I opened previously.
When I used the "update", it would just hang.
If I reloaded the page, then waited a couple of minutes, the reload worked in a second or two.
XP Pro + FF 2.0.0.4
Otherwise sweet system for those of us who use a feed reader and who might not actually get to read the comments untill hours later.
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