Comment by baddox
12 years ago
Fair enough. I would much prefer fixing the long comment thread problem with 5 lines of JavaScript than implementing this bizarre system.
12 years ago
Fair enough. I would much prefer fixing the long comment thread problem with 5 lines of JavaScript than implementing this bizarre system.
If you have a solution to this particular problem, whether in 5 or 500 lines of JS, I think it would be novel.
I've yet to see any discussion forum solve the problem of long threads with lots of useless fluff floating to the top.
Collapsing threads do the job pretty well. And you're always going to get comments that aren't relevant to you, because you're not the only person doing the endorsing. If a comment is useless fluff to you, but gets endorsed by someone else, then you still have a scrolling problem. Not so with collapsable commeents.
All I meant is to by default collapse all comments with depth > n.
You don't use Reddit do you?
They use a very simple system, collapsing posts after a certain depth, and hiding more comments after a certain number (10, I believe) at the level below the top comment (sorted by score obviously).
It works extremely well, and thanks to the fast JS collapsing, it's not at all a hassle to read a subthread that happened to get collapsed if it piques your interest.
It's so simple it may easily be overlooked in its obviousness, but really you don't need a very complex system that is strictly a lot better than no collapsing at all.
What's wrong with (old) slashdot (I mean, technically) ?
While I'm usually a kind of hard core html-first, ajax/js/webapps later kind of guy -- I'd love for the comments to be served up in a json-blob, with a couple of user-settable preferences ("Show only comments rated higher than N, hide threads with lower (median/mean) rating than N, show all direct replies to my comments -- and similar).