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Slashdot Discussion System Updates

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stuff-to-play-with dept.

This week we have a few new functions for you comment readers guaranteed to amaze and enchant. Or at least to make your day a little more efficient. The biggest update is that the system should remember what comments you've already read (for a few weeks anyway) but there's some other less interesting stuff as well. Hit the link below to read more.

So D2 now remembers what you have read. This will mostly be useful to readers who use the key bindings to navigate -- we didn't really want to guess if you've read something, but if you use the WASD keys to navigate, moving on from a comment flags it as read. Read comments are slightly faded, and if you re-enter a discussion a few hours later, it should remember what you've read.

We've simplified comment retrieval as well. If you get to the 'End' of a discussion and try to get more comments (either by clicking one of the various 'More' links, or by pressing a keybinding like S or D that tells us to move on to the next comment) a dialog box will show up asking you if you would like to lower your threshold. So if you normally read at Score:4, and read to the end of the Score:4 comments, it will offer to lower your threshold to Score:3 either for all time, or just for this page. This means you don't need to constantly raise and lower your threshold to handle discussions of different sizes. This works really nicely.

Lastly is a user preference in the pref pane labeled 'Collapse Comments After Reading.' I'm actually considering making this one on by default but I'm open to feedback. It does what it says -- after you've navigated off a comment (using the keybindings again), it collapses the comment you just left. This makes it very easy to keep your place in a discussion as it grows. This is especially useful in discussions where you want to leave a tab open for several hours, or else come back later and figure out what's new.

There are undoubtedly bugs: feel free to email me or post them to the bug tracker. Thanks to pudge for hacking all this stuff too. Especially the bugs -- he wrote those first.

2 of 345 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Need Automatic -1 "Redundant Idiot" Mod by sm62704 · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    You are out of your tiny little cowardly mind, son.

    1. The US may not be not a fascist state, but it's a police state. Get rid of the secret police (who we call "plainclothes" and "undercover" and start obeying the Constitution and I might agree with you.
    2. the statement "Bush lied, people died," is a true statement
    3. "The US is losing in Iraq" is so far probably true; we've been there longer than we were in WWII. Show me some evidence to the contrary.
    4. Saddam Hussein had WMD, but it was before the first Gulf war. The UN inspectors never found any evidence whatever that there were WMD when they were looking for them.
    5. The US sold Saddam Hussein his WMD
    6. "Bush claimed Saddam was behind 9/11" Jesus, Dude, if you haven't heard Bush talking about how we're in Iraq in the fight against terrorism you're not paying attention.
    7. Downmodding a statement because you don't agree with it is an abuse of mod points
    8. You're a troll
    --
    mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
  2. Re:Display bugs by kestasjk · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    It's fine. "Moan moan moan, what updates are next?" What else could you expect from /.?

    Good work /. thanks for the updates.

    --
    // MD_Update(&m,buf,j);