Here’s my understanding of the way Discourse does the “in reply to” tag at the top:
If your reply comes immediately after the message you’re replying to, there’s no “in reply to” tag (which is what I did with this message)
If your message is spawned by highlighting text and clicking the “quote reply” popup, there’s no “in reply to” tag (but the quoted snippet of text does include both the option to expand to show the whole quoted post, and also a button to jump back up to the quoted post)
Otherwise, replies spawned by clicking a message’s “Reply” box at lower-left should always carry an “in reply to” tag at the top. Using the +Reply button at the bottom of a thread simply adds the post to the bottom of the thread without linking it to a previous reply.
A brilliant idea! (That’s what we need – a brilliant idea…)
Well, until one comes up, here’s an idea for a tell that would make it obvious that the “Replies” dropdown is not a threaded view: don’t show the whole comment. Make it a list of responders, with a little of the reply as context and an arrow to jump to the post proper. If you’re feeling really clever, then show the whole comment on hover.
A long time ago, in BB’s second implementation of commenting, the comments were numbered. It was one way to have a conversation without losing where you were and there wasn’t any threading back then, so we made do. One of the first things everyone complained about when BB upgraded the commenting system was the loss of the numbers next to the comments. I say, bring 'em back.
My second suggestion would be to have the “jump to” buttons off to the right of the comment display box do more than go to the very first or very last comment. Say I want to reply to comment 12 of 22; I hit reply, type my comment, and suddenly find myself at the bottom of the page. Not too big a deal on a topic with only a few comments, but when there are 50 or more comments, it’s tedious trying to get back to where you were.
A few tweeks, and flat commenting will be fine. We’ll get used to it again.
We had post numbers in the initial design, but had to pull them later as we couldn’t figure out where to fit them. Nobody complained! You can get post number at any time by clicking the link button – the browser’s URL also always reflects the current post number, it is updated in real time as you scroll.
Well, the intent is that you read the entire topic and reply after reading everything – scrolling with the composer up as you read to the bottom. So that conflicts a bit.
The point of the in-place expansions is that you can smoothly flow downward with gravity toward the bottom of the topic. The minute you start bouncing up in time, or down in time, that flow is broken. It’s possible, yes, but it’s not the intent. We want your eye point to stay laser focused on where you are right now, as you inexorably flow down toward the pot o’ gold at the end of the topic – your reply!
(And as a further reward for your read-all-the-way-to-the-bottom prowess, even more stuff to read in the Suggested Topics, because Reading is Fundamental.)
That makes sense for overall flow. But I find myself always clicking that “# Replies” button, reading the responses then getting lost/confused when the same text is repeated again further down the chain. It helps when people use quotes in their response but not everyone does that.
So I would say I agree that I think the “# replies” part should be removed and rely on the indicators added to the replies themselves, if you needed to see what the person is responding to. That seems to fit with the flow all the way down idea better of this flat style design imho.
Disclosure: I’m an alien who doesn’t read Reddit or Slashdot or any other forum really, so the flat design was really confusing at first. I’m getting used to it though.
I really don’t like the fact that a reply directly under the replied-to post doesn’t announce itself as a reply. This exception breaks the semantics of the page.
Whilst the disqus approach certainly had it’s drawbacks (multiple replies to one comment stacked and pulled apart the more public conversations anyway), I can’t help feeling we’ve lost some of the immediacy to the conversations taking place.
Now perhaps it’s really only the work of a few seconds, but those extra beats ruin the entrainment of the experience of following two or more minds dancing with each other.
How difficult would it be to have a column-shaped pop up on the right of the comment box, that stacks bubbles of previous comments in the conversation between the commenter and the repliers comment which you are clicking/expanding/rolling-over?
That doesn’t seem to have anything to do with what I said about not showing the whole content – in fact, reading replies in the replies dropdown is “bouncing down in time”, so you seem to be agreeing with me.
It might not be your intent. What about my intent?
“Is this the New Cruelty?”
“You can have … table fourteen.”
If you haven’t moved your eyepoint, and you haven’t skipped down 25, 50, 100 posts in the stream – you aren’t bouncing down in time.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m open to improvements in the “in reply to”, “replies”, and “user said…” expansions. Mockups of what you’re thinking are always very helpful.
Whilst I was mocking up a bmp in paint with my mad skillz I kept testing the interface and essentially, I should have just described it as a scroll box version of the design you have, inclusive of the conversation to that point.
Also, I find that my justification for the suggested justification of the ‘in reply to’ pop up was unjustified.
Now that I ‘think’ about it, is it even possible to do that without introducing another dimension, to at least capture others comments and branches of the tree…
Ok, Ima do a mock up of this idea, complete with unicorns and that kinda stuff.
One thing that keeps putting me off is to keep seeing the same reply posts down the page again as if they are top level ones. These could be marked as replies so you can decide to skip them or just be shown collapsed if you have already browsed through it earlier on. I believe someone already mentioned it.
PS.: After using, mostly by leaching, stackoverflow for so long I can only expect great things from this here! Really exciting.
For what it is worth, I found this thread via the “Suggested Topics” box at the bottom of another post and it looks like there is a small bug in the code maybe(?)
This is what was displayed in the Suggested Topics listing:
Improvements to Discourse flat comment design 14 15
The numbers at the end, when hoovered over say something like:
“You have 14 unread posts in this topic”
“There are 15 new posts in this topic since you last visited”
Unless I am misunderstanding something (which is likely) I do not understand how there can be 15 new posts since I last visited, but only 14 unread posts. It seems there should be at least 15 unread posts if there are 15 new posts.
Unread means that you have visited the topic and didn’t read everything while there. So it will usually have fewer unread than new. New is the count of posts that you never knew about before. They are independent
