With respect, that doesn’t answer my question.
I’m asking how something could be deemed notable, and then later have that designation reversed.
Thanks.
Because we’re constantly tweaking the rules right now to decide what works, and what the BB team prefers? Just a thought.
Also, probably a global international conspiracy.
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Presumably, the page only shows the x most notable replies, so there’s some flux. As new replies come along and get more likes, the old ‘notable’ one gets shunted down and out.
I have no idea though, is there a fixed amount of NRs per post, or is it all that meet a threshold of notability?
[sincere] No, I genuinely thought you were in the admin group or a special tester or something. Maybe you need to be a member for 24 hours or something? Or maybe they changed the settings after you posted.
So I guess the issue is that you guys are coming from the angle of reducing noise/signal, which is awesome for stack overflow, but a different problem for conversations.
So let’s see : as a forum user, I expect to see all the posts in a topic. It’s not that much data.
I think that trying to reduce the amount of posts in memory is utterly the wrong strategy. You could maybe do some kind of insane implimented-in-javascript compression hack, but that’s probably only going to compound the problem.
I seriously recommend you look at the way livejournal works. SERIOUSLY. Call me a saddo emo kid all you like, but the simple fact is, they have the most easily comprehended and simple conversation threading. Your approach of constantly modifying the dataset needs more refinement, it just behaves in a totally unexpected and seemingly irrational way.
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That makes sense.
Right… my contributions are a bit of joke to you. Nice to know.
My point is, comments are like, effort. For the superstar bloggers and their minions. But it’s their blog.
Of course, they do make a fair bit of money from their readership, so there’s some eyeball monetising going on, hence this.
Just shoot me, directly in the head.
- I see paging so, no they are not keeping 700 posts in memory.
- I see animated avatars that are raping my eyes.
- I see collapsed conversation that requires a round trip to expand.
There is no practical way to give you 500 post topic stored in memory and rendered in the DOM without partially loading stuff and doing tricks.
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Waiting for the big reveal where you tell us it was all an evil experiment to harvest our souls and we all fell for it. The clues have been there all along.
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Because the algorithm was changed.
Right, the comment community started flat with Movable Type in '07, moved to threaded Disqus in '11, and has now been moved to flat Discourse in '13. What I was getting at is that the current community, the one that’s been moved, grew in a threaded environment. They may have shared a history and even some personnel with the community of '07, but they’re no more the same group than the 113th Congress is the same group as the 106th Congress.
And looking back at history, I see that you and the other Boingers had intended for the Disqus comments to be flat as well; why did you never switch the threading off?
I think that we started out flat in Disqus and ended up going to threaded on a whim one day.
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My same point stands though.
They are not keeping all posts in memory. You are expected to page (page 1,2,3,4) this reloads the browser … you are expected to expand comments (round trips to the server, data is not stored in the web browser)
Thanks.
(By the way, I do know that it’s supposed to be less conversational than has been the case today. I’ll work on that.
)
There was an episode of The Good Wife that hinged on exactly what an algorithm is when one is talking about search or in our present case comment selection. It came down to whether or not the owner-genius of the search engine company would admit that his “fiddling with the algorithm” meant that he just promoted things he liked.
Disqus used to load dynamically when you scrolled down far enough to see the comment section, and IIRC it only loaded on about 5% of page impressions.
We did some ‘heat map’ testing once to see where people scrolled to absolutely on the page, and I think about 8% of people scrolled down far enough to see comments then. That was a few years back.
We like experimenting.
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@beschizza, would it be possible for a link to each post’s Discourse thread to appear in the RSS feed?
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Excellent idea. We’re working on RSS stuff right now (to publicize some of the sexiest feeds at bb) so baking that in would be super.
