[Experimental Feature] "New Comments" view

Riotmoltovcarrot·10/8/2013, 9:24:54 PM·14 votes·3,069 views

Hey everyone,

Here on the community beta team, we've been keeping a close eye on your feedback and are exploring solutions to a number of improvements we would like to make to this community beta.

One of the problems we're focusing on right now is making it easier to track changes and return to discussions you've previously engaged in. You may have noticed the new comments tag on certain discussions in the listing view. We are experimenting with building more functionality onto those.

The following is a feature we're considering, and I'd love to get your thoughts! Do you think this new view would help you return to discussions and re-engage with comments of interest?

Thanks,

MoltovCarrot

25 Comments

Kira Onime10/8/2013, 9:32:29 PM4 votes

Yes.. definitely a yes.

The "new posts" was a nice start and works decently well for discussion with a low amount of replies.

When you go in a conversation with 100-150+ posts, trying to find the new ones is painstakingly long and more often than not, I just don't bother.

Tiara Azmalan10/9/2013, 12:57:19 AM3 votes

I mentioned this in the huge thread about problems with the "reddit" style system regarding following threads, but it was well after the main discussion had ended.

Currently, posts alternate between white and a sort of greyish blue. What if new posts in a thread you've read before were off-colored, so that you can quickly pick them out when scrolling down? Something like a lavender and pastel pink or something like that?

ModCaptainMårvelous10/8/2013, 10:53:23 PM2 votes

Very nice, very nice.

Pryotra10/8/2013, 11:52:49 PM2 votes

I both like and hate this.

I like the "X New" button we currently have. It's a good start.

I hate the new view. In low reply ammounts, I am pretty sure it could work. However, this site is supposed to eventually swallow GD, which means that is the sort of traffic it needs to handle. In that scenario, it is a terrible idea. Replies would happen too fast. Seriously, by the time I finish posting this, I would miss at least a page of replies due to traffic

I think that you should keep visibility restricted to direct replies until you click "show more", and replying powers restricted to when you can see the direct children of the post you want to reply to. You could attach a bar at the bottom of parent replies stating how many children, how many red replies, and how many new, with red replies and new being links into that discussion.

So, if you were to look at this thread as I post this, by default Kira's and Capt's replies to the OP would be seen, but your reply, and all subsequent replies, would be hidden, and I would only be able to make a direct reply. Under Kira's reply, I would see a bar that says 4 children , X new replies, and 2 red replies. I would not be able to reply to Kira without expanding the direct children, in this case your post, but anything under that would be hidden by a similar bar.

Zielmann10/9/2013, 12:03:22 AM2 votes

Perhaps it's just the example used, paired with the fact that I can't play with the feature itself to see exactly how it works... but the new comments still aren't all that clear to me. Like... I can't tell which posts in the screenshot are supposed to be the 'new' ones.

Would it be possible to highlight the new posts in that light yellow color, like you do when you click 'go to post' when you look at your updates?

Also, I notice several collapsed parents in the example. Putting aside my concern for the well-being of those parents, I was wondering if only the new posts were going to be displayed, with the option to show the parent if you want to, or if that section of the thread/conversation would be somewhat expanded. I feel like showing at least the previous post that the new post is responding to, if applicable, would help to add some context to the reply.

Khristophoros10/9/2013, 1:57:36 AM1 votes

Is there or will there be a way to see a thread in chronological order? How about custom filtering options? Those kinds of things come to mind when thinking about catching up on discussions. Without those kinds of options I'm afraid it will be hard to follow stuff. The new posts thing is good but how useful is it when there are a large number of new posts?