Feedback on vertical timeline

Oddly this is fine on my home lappy that has a 17" screen. But the external monitor at work, lots of white space on the right.

What do I look like, Pakistani Denzel?

No a Pakistani Dalek!

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I know, I saw.

FYI, my notifications seem to be malfunctioning.

I didnā€™t even know that you had replied to my comment until now.

They can be lateā€¦ Also I tend to get a reply notification then a quote notification later. shrug

personally I think @codinghorror and his crew have made a damn nice BBS even with the minor annoyances.

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I donā€™t recall saying that they havenā€™t.

Of all the sites Iā€™ve ever frequented, the BBS is one of the few thatā€™s got a really good rapport with its membership regarding taking their input into account.

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Bit of a scrum over the timeline though. It seems more rugby style than chickens and pigs, but probably healthy none the less.

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Funnily enough I cough wrote a blog entry that covers this exact situation https://blog.codinghorror.com/chickens-pigs-and-really-inappropriate-terminology/

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my biggest issue is not the slider but the huge blue reply blob near my field of vision

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But seriously, as I read the above feedback, the moving part is the bigger distraction, and that is absolutely the position / scrollbar which I do think looks fine ā€“ arguably better ā€“ in a more sedate monochrome.

I agree the position bar didnā€™t need to be so blue and attention grabbing. That is deployed now!

The right gutter topic reply button is consistent with the bottom-most topic reply button. Note that it also disappears when you scroll all the way down, since it would be duplicating that button.

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I like the more muted blue. Iā€™m still not sure what Iā€™m gaining by having an extra way to scroll, and the dates over there. Maybe some others find it useful.

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So there has definitely been something about the scrollbar which has been putting me off it since it was released, but I havenā€™t been able to identify what it was until just now while I was reading @renkeā€™s comment about it moving.

When you click the scrollbar to scroll to a different post it moves and the post # listed next to it changes, but the posts donā€™t actually moveā€¦ and this may sound weird, but I think it may actually be giving me a little bit of motion sickness :confused:. This is only compounded by the fact that when you scroll from say post #1 to post #51 in a topic with the new scrollbar it has to reload the topic page, however I realize that a scrollbar on the bbs has to work this way based on how the BBS loads posts. All of this goes back to what @renke is saying though, when I scroll with the already existing scrollbar in my browser I see the posts move, and I donā€™t have to reload the topic, but having the UI on the BBS for moving through a topic be a scrollbar that without visually moving postsā€¦ Iā€™m just not sure about it yet.

EDIT: Iā€™m starting to wonder if this is literally about feedback, and I donā€™t mean as in us giving you feedback @codinghorror but as in haptic feedback. The scrollbar doesnā€™t create any feedback, other than the numbers next to it changing and it moving up and down its line, I have nothing to gauge on how far I have moved through the ā€˜spaceā€™ of the web page, using the scrollbar eliminates the illusion of a topic existing as a physical space or room inside the BBS and it is very disorienting. In comparison a standard web browser scrollbar causes the entire page to move.

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No sickness here. I agree about the scrolling and not having the posts move.

ETA: Retracting the statement about post numbers. I was off about that.The posts need to scroll if you use the timeline bar for it to make sense.

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Hm, could the scrollbar be replaced with something more like the post/topic tracker you get when you are replying to someone in a thread, maybe you could have it also display the most recent post and first post dates on either side of it, you could even make the blue highlighted part of it be draggable if you really wanted to and still show the post date of the post you are currently looking atā€¦ like a sideways scroll bar? I just feel like that would be less disorienting, but then again if the posts still arenā€™t moving when you are dragging or adjusting even a sideways scroll bar it still might feel off, thoughts?

EDIT: Oh, you already get something like this when you use the ā€œ#ā€ keyboard shortcut.

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Regarding the ā€œReplyā€ button at the bottom of the timeline, I agree with the earlier comment that it really grabs attention visually, but I think it might be more problematic than that.

If reading is more important than writing, why add a shortcut to commenting on a topic without at least scrolling through the existing ones? Having a ā€œreply to threadā€ button floating on the side will just encourage people to reply without reading preceding comments, which is already enough of an issue as it is.

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Agreed, but

  1. Thereā€™s no real way of stopping people from replying early if they are hell bent on doing it. At least the editor does not prevent them from reading as they reply, here. Or even navigating to a completely different topic altogether while editing. It all works.

  2. If they are gonna reply early, theyā€™ll jam ā€œreplyā€ on the first post they see that sets them off anyhow ā€¦ which is effectively the same thing. You know, people are Frequently Wrong On The Internet.

Longer term I think things like showing, for new users, how many posts they read in the topic next to their username ā€“ will have a more significant deterrent effect than hiding the reply button from them.

(and we werenā€™t really even doing that, because every post has a reply button, yes?)

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Honestly Iā€™m speaking from what we have now. Iā€™m not keeping a local copy of the git repo, if there is one. :wink: Speaking specificly to the reply per post, yes thatā€™s always existed and should probably stay. It requires you to reply to an individual though. Thatā€™s different than replying to a topic. People respond.

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Right but in terms of

scroll until I am pissed off enough to prove someone is Wrong on The Internet, then slam the Reply button on their post

there is 0.0% difference.

I suppose. Has it statistically worked out that way? (Youā€™re in the position to have data on something like this.)

If you stop on me specifically, I guarantee youā€™ll get a different response than if you just tack it on the end of a thread.