Regarding slow performance and slow performance in Firefox.
One HUGE reason this topic is particularly problematic is cause many users are hitting the first post and then loading up all the posts up to the last one.
At the moment we NEVER unload ANY posts from memory while you are scrolling through, the end result is that using large topics just gets slower and slower and the number posts grow.
VERY HIGH on our priority list is to improve this so we keep the amount of posts in memory very low, this will heavily help performance. Additionally I plan to profile Firefox next week to see if there are any easy wins, have heard a few complaints about perf in Firefox and I mostly use chrome.
Look around the shorter topics, are they performing well? If so, expect the same performance on longer topics once we are done.
Please keep up the feedback, we are listening and trying to address stuff as quickly as we can.
No, you can bring up the composer at any time. You can also navigate to other topics or the topic list with the composer up. In any case we save a draft per topic in the background, so you could turn your computer off, drive across town, log in to a different computer, go back to the topic and continue composing your reply.
Pardon me but I think there should be a pref for turning off this âquote replyâ when you select text. It gets quite annoying when some of us speed read using selected text.
Rob,
Firstly, âFree Speech Zonesâ was a very poor choice of analogy. Believe it or not, I didnât intend it to have anything to do with âfree speechâ per se at all, which really has nothing to do with what weâre talking about here. Rather, I was anticipating and trying to head off a response (from commenters) that âif you donât like âNotable Repliesâ, then just go to the BBSâ, which wouldnât have been addressing the issue.
The analogy was clumsy (which, I suppose all (language) analogies are by definition, to some degree. In any case, this particular one was unhelpful, and damaged the thrust of my argument).
I get that. Iâm not trying to tell you that you shouldnât do [something], only trying to encourage consideration of whether youâd want to.
I never thought of it as a âpublicâ space, but it is, in a sense, a community. You may not (or may - I donât know) see it that way, but your readers certainly do. In my case, I think of the comments as roughly half of the overall value.
When I talk about âopen cultureâ here itâs not in the sense of me demanding access to a soapbox, rather asking you to consider whether youâre promoting a democratic system or a hierarchical & hegemonic one, and whether thatâs desirable.
Well, thereâs always going to be a few dickheads, but pound-for-pound the quality of commentary is waaay above what anyone might have a right to expect. Maybe thereâs a lot more going on than the occasional deleted message and the odd nudge from editors. I donât knowâŚ
Iâm not bothered. A rose by any other name, and all thatâŚ
I think youâre reading a bit more into my imagination than was explicit. Also, hopefully, other clarifications earlier in this comment have addressed that too.
The design of a comment system is incredibly prone to unintended consequences (The fact that - in 2013 - there is still nothing approaching a âperfectâ standard, and weâre still debating how best to do it bears this out, I think.) I just hope that the philosophy behind âNotable Repliesâ, and the other changes, is rigorously examined, because itâs - IMO - quite important (to the site, not me).
Anyway, thatâs enough for now. Thanks for reading.
I can understand why contributors donât want comments to the articles any more, and donât want readers to read what other comments. Commenters often disagree with them, or they point to errors, and it just looks messy and distracting with a long string of comments to an article. So, they want to hide them away in the basement of the Web, where only the argumentative and obsessive people like yours truly bother go, because we canât help ourselves when we see someone being wrong on the Internet! All the casual readers can live in peace and harmony on the pristine first floor of the boingboing Palace never knowing about the reviewing and nitpicking going on below.
But itâs a pity. Because frankly, the comments section is often the real substance of an article. Itâs such a huge resource of knowledge and opinions. Without the comments who does the fact-checking? Who contributes with expert knowledge? Who links to context? Who provides the critical review and challenges the opinions?
I appreciate that the boingboing contributors provide content that I often enjoy. That is why this site is among my bookmarks. But content without comments is no good to me: I want the peer-review! And I appreciate that this is tricky to administrate, that having hundreds of comments to an article is hard to moderate or lay out in a way that is user friendly. Itâs a tough biscuit, but that doesnât mean it isnât worth it.
Thank whatever gods may be. Disqus was a mess of trackers and insisted you spreadâem wide open to play. Also an omnivorous data aggregator. Glad to be able to praise great posts agin & share my bountiful peregrinationatories.
I hope BB is able to find a way to nestle the comments back into their pages by clever cross-site enscripting using HTML5. Jumping around is for cooties.
Sounds like you want people to contribute, but you want to control what they get to say in âyourâ space. Sort of like Obama, and like 1950s newspapers throughout the land. Only: whatâs BoingBoing without the readers?
However, Iâd like to add my 2 carrots to the stew, the comments below a sometimes dreary article, spiced up the article to such an extent that I kept coming back to it. And being sure that your comment WILL appear was cool, now youâll have to say something so smart that everyone thinks your smart and upvote/give more karma/like your so much that it would appear. bleghâŚ
Anyway, letâs see how this works, if Iâll just be reading Boing Boing from now on, or going through the trouble to raise my voice once in a while like I used to.
Thats exactly what I thought after reading robs post. You want to vent your Ideas to the public using the internet as medium (perhaps earn a pretty penny, directly or indirectly by increasing your journalistic âmarket valueâ") but want to behave like the public doesnât exist âŚ
âMyy preciousssssâ
BTW Why is disqus still used? The newer articles all have a disqus thread.
How is creating a whole new forum for the BB audience âbehaving like the public doesnât exist?â A forum, I might add, where you are free to start your own topics at will!
This site is now broken for me, as it no longer fits the way I was actually using it.
I used to use the comment counts above each article as a means to judge the amount of âdiscussion buzzâ around a given posting, which would then influence my wanting to read the article, but then also the discussion around it. The discussion (tied to the article) was one of the big draws to the site for me, as the discussions were/are frequently as enjoyable/interesting/useful/entertaining as the actual article.
In short, I didnât/donât really come to BoingBoing for the articles. There are plenty of places to read interesting postings from around the web. What I really come here for is the PEOPLE of the BB community, and their relatively intelligent commentary on the postings. The stuff people are really talking about is the stuff I want to read. (and then I want to see what all of the hype is about via the discussion, after reading the piece.) THAT to me is BoingBoing.
I would get excited when I saw an article with a huge comment count, as it meant there was something going on there, and I want to know what it is. (Even if the actual title of the article wasnât anything particularly interesting sounding.)
This change effectively breaks this site for me (and Iâm sure there are others), to the point where itâs almost useless now, as the main features I was using are gone, and there is no longer any way to instantly gauge where the âbuzzâ is surrounding the postings. The âexcitement factorâ has been removed, and it isnât as useful or fun as it was previously.
