Then, please, remove the replies button and any semblance of vestigal threading, so we have truly flat comments? and if we want to refer to another comment, we’ll do it inline ourselves? That would be vastly better than this. Sorry.
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You can do it both ways. If you highlight a comment you actually get a button to make quoting really easy.
If I thought this were remotely close to broken I wouldn’t be using it or praising it. I truly like what I see. It may not be fully polished, but it certainly isn’t broken.
That seems like overkill for delivering content that in itself would be perfectly readable on a VT100?
Try the “Reply as new Topic” option if you want to get into a side conversation with someone. If you’re trying to follow one line of discussion within a bigger topic, then you probably should split it off into its own topic, imho.
The images associated with the “category” and “participants” columns make the board look “busy” visually. Maybe too busy. I wouldn’t want to see those on my phone, especially the gravatars.
Also, the “new topic” stars…well, they are all new topics, so…I think they just add to the clutter. Less is more.
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They get so full up I think that entire column (and perhaps one or two of the numbers columns) might get display:hidden soon. But I want to see it running vanilla for as long as possible
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Love the high contrast of the main text! (Although honestly the white backgrounds are like staring into a searchlight if you’re using a programmer-type multi-screen high productivity rig in a darkened room. Works OK with corporate fluorescents or outdoors, I’d assume.)
All the grey on grey type makes my eyes red and watery, though. Sorry but I am old.
I hope you’ll develop something more friendly to the vision and hearing impaired… amber text on black backgrounds is my personal fave although green on black is good too.
It’s already better than disqus, although I’d prefer not to use Adobe’s remotely hosted scripts. You increase your attack surface when you pull in typekit.net, makes you more hackable.
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So I just read your linked post on threading and, while I obviously think you are wrong, I also feel it’s important for me to actually alphanumerically, sans the numerically, type-out that you’re wrong.
You’re wrong.
Now, don’t get me wrong… what you wrote was definitely worth the read, but only in so much that it wasn’t.
All such importantitudes of my above word-truths aside, I’ll just say the following:
Screens are flat; conversations are put-your-glasses-on-and-velcro-dat-ass-to-dat-seat 3D.
I know this isn’t the place for this particular debate, and the roots of your opinion on this matter run deep (roots of a tree, dawg… a treeeee) so there won’t be any mind changing or persuading in this comment.
But I will leave you with this proverb from, I believe it was, the red lion from Voltron:
Way back in the not-too-distant wayback of waybacks. Mozilla Firebird
was all like, “Tabs, yo… tabs!”, and Microsoft IE was all like,
“… Say whaaaa…? lol” and it was a true story, the end.Moral: Don’t be a Cringer.
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If I return to a thread and am at the bottom of a long discussion, it would be nice to “sense” if I’m scrolling up slowly to read context, or if I’m flicking/scrolling quickly to read the OP so that I don’t need to scroll/wait/scroll/wait for infinite scroll just to skip over everything and get to the top.
I just noticed the up/down arrows, but it wasn’t originally intuitive to me that those jump to the top and bottom. Maybe I’m just conditioned to look for double arrows for top/bottom and single arrows for “jump a page”. Or maybe I didn’t notice them before because I was replying to a post and those arrows don’t show up there.
As an aside, I’m not a fan of the promoted comments on the main bb story page and then needing to click on the “continue the discussion”. It feels too much like Gawker.
You can also click the title of a topic to jump to the top. Clicking the last post dates on the topic map (or the topic list for that matter) will jump you to the end of the topic.
This is an interesting hybrid system you all have set up. I should say first that I like the idea of a BB forum, it’s a good community, and I am eager to see reader contributions, especially. One drawback is that it is hard to tell just by looking at the front page (boingboing.net) which discussions are “hot.” I’ve clicked on many a BB article simply because it had, say, over 100 comments (and I’ve avoided some as well…I’m looking at you gun control pie fights.)
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This. Well said.
Needs more green on black.
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Yes, I can do it like that. But unless the site makes a policy of it, I can’t read other peoples’ comments if they don’t?
Briefly: there is no way to follow a thread. I can’t read a comment, then a reply to that comment, then a reply to the reply, because the “replies” dropdown does not decorate posts like the main view. I can’t even like a reply to a comment.
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Will each article have a link to its related BBS thread, or will we need to dig for it?
When reading on a mobile device, I find I have to turn it into landscape mode to get the text at a readable size because the text won’t flow into a sufficiently narrow width to read it in portrait. However when I do that the black bar at the top uses up about a quarter of the screen space, cramping the screen somewhat.
I’m using Chrome on a Galaxy S2 running Android 4.1.
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This was the original plan! I’ll fish out the mockups.
It’s kind of a bad idea, but I will eventually make it an option 
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