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Iterating on the Discussion List view

RiotMontag·10/21/2013, 6:35:58 PM·5 votes·1,380 views

Hi Community Beta Hackers!

We're iterating on the discussion list view. I've been searching through all your comments so far looking for feedback about it, and I've had a hard time coalescing it all in one place, so I figured I'd just ask you guys about it and point our designers here.

We like goal statements, because it allows us to try lots of crazy ideas and measure them against the results they produce, so I'll start with a goal that sounds pretty good to me.

  • Our Goal: We want to make it easy for you to find a thread you want to read.
    • You should see the information most relevant first
    • Information of secondary relevance should still be pretty easy to get to

We're looking everywhere for inspiration, so if you know of a place that you think does this well, tell us about it. Doesn't even have to be a traditional forum site. It could be a news site, a social media site, whatever you want.

  • Tell us what you like about the discussion list view
  • Tell us what you don't like about the discussion list view
  • Show us examples of sites you think make it easy for you to find something to read
  • Tell us what information is most relevant to you when you're looking for something to read

I'll put the standard Soon™ disclaimer here. No guarantee we'll build what you guys suggest, but your feedback will help us figure out what to build and why to build it, which will ensure its awesomeness.

13 Comments

ploki12210/22/2013, 12:28:30 AM6 votes
  • Tell us what you like about the discussion list view

What I like about the discussion list view is pretty simple. There is a lot less noise going around compared to standard vBulletin boards. The fact that it's already pre-sorted based on hits/votes means that I don't have to sort through billions of pages to find what I want.

I also love the fact that, at first sight, you know if you've been on a specific topic once or not.

  • Tell us what you don't like about the discussion list view

There are plenty of things I don't like. Firt of all, that reduced noise gets cancelled by other noise I can't filter out (yet). A prime example would be the (# new) tag always showing up even if I only misclicked the thread once. Another would be how I cannot have a middle ground between a ~2-3 days full refresh and a ~3 hours full refresh. Being able to set how Recent:Top you want your front page to be would be really amazing.

Another thing I dislike is the cold lack of personalization. You guys said you were aiming for it to truly be communities more than a simple discussion boards. Then, I'd love to see some personalization options.
Things like a slider for Best's Hot:New ratio. Something like being able to define a a few flags (I'll explain that in an external thread since it'll make my comment explode).
Something like having a friend list, and that posts your friends interact with can be seen on a 2nd tab. You'd have the General tab, the Friend tab and the Personal Tab (only threads you interacted with personally).
Also, if you do the friend list thingy, don't force it to be mutual or tied with in-game one. I may want to add Montag because I like his 23-tome long posts about markdown, but he may not give 2 cents about me.
Next on the posible thing, since we have friends, may as well add private and possibly public messaging (the problem with public is obvious tho... Morello's wall will be like Berlin's and Witch hunting will be even more present).

  • Show us examples of sites you think make it easy for you to find something to read

None, that's the problem! This one is probably the best, however I still find there's room for way more.

  • Tell us what information is most relevant to you when you're looking for something to read

First of all, title, author and post date are absolute musts. # commenta and # new are nice, but not necessary imo. Once you have h ability to follow threads, I believe that you can actually do without that info (you could still highlight updated discussions). The preview is handy, but it requires more imo. First of all, the title attribute has always been ugly, but on longer posts the intro often cover up most of it., so either a bigger and/or cuztomiable preview (with a simple markdown tag).

Also, I may be repeating myself, but : Tags :P.

Kira Onime10/21/2013, 7:50:55 PM2 votes

While probably a bit off subject, 1 thing that might get this new testing-platform a better accepted coming, would be the ability to switch how posts are displayed on one's session. Either display them the way they are right now or, switch to a more "classical" view ala-GD.

I don't exactly have knowledge of the backend and I'm going on a wild guess, but I'm assuming in the database, each post that is considered a "child" of a "parent" post, discussion starting post aside, should have some form of ID or value of it's parent stored somewhere.

Assuming this, wouldn't it be possible of, instead of having it this way right now, you display each post individually and should the post have a value in the "parent" tab, have said parent displayed in a quote tab?

Like mentioned before, I'm going on a wild guess from what I know on my end and if I'm right, this solution to me, doesn't seem out of reach.

Daen10/21/2013, 8:25:16 PM2 votes

Ugh, I wrote out an entire reply and then clicked something that deleted it all. :(

I think the Suggestion thing is a great idea, it'd allow people to see threads that're either under appreciated or that they just haven't seen yet and are relevant to their interests.

I'd also really like to see some functionality revolving around following certain threads and not others. Currently from what I can tell the system basically auto-follows any thread you look at, and when I'm looking at basically everything it obfuscates things for me. I'd really like to be able to choose certain threads that I want to see new posts from and others that I don't, and it could be very possible to link this to the upvote system.

Overall I think the system is great thus far, it's way more clear than reddit and waaaay easier to navigate than GD/the current forums. The information you circled asking about its relevancy seems necessary to me, none of it seems worthless.

P.S. I don't think Riot threads actually trigger the icon on the righthand side. Riot posts do, but this thread doesn't actually have the "a Rioter posted here" icon. Just wanted to point that out!

Solan Stonewhip10/21/2013, 6:56:33 PM2 votes

really like the thread style. make it easier to follow conversations than in the old format. love the red tracker.

dislike: is the lack of alerts as to when others comment on the thread but not on your comment a kind of subscribe button of sorts? additionally, i don't think the colors showing new threads are apparent enough. in the sbnation articles (www.silversevensens.com, you will need to login to see what i'm talking about though) for example, they're yellow when you haven't read them. by pressing z, you clear to the next one. then it shows you if there's a 'new' post.

as for finding a new discussion. my only real complain is that on the 'best' thread, we have a lot of really old posts. is there any plan to archive those at some point? i find the 'hot' and 'recent' tabs far more useful for day to day perusal.

the forum, while it tells you that there's a new post. it doesn't seem to distinguish from my own posts. i'll re-enter the comment thread to find that the new post is my own. that's minor annoyance, not a big deal.

it would be nice, to see some kind of foot print that tells us if riot has read the post regardless of if it's been posted on by a rioter. if we know you're reading, we know you're listening.

this isn't terribly coherent. sorry.

Fawlty10/22/2013, 2:28:37 AM1 votes

I would like to have some easier way to follow the threads I'm interested in. Either a bookmark folder, or a favorites bar or something that notifies me (on the site)

This site is quite painful on my eyes. I think it's the lack of colour?

The toggle options while at first makes you go "oh cool" later makes you feel stagnated and stuck with old material.

silverbacon10/22/2013, 6:06:00 AM1 votes

I would love an icon to appear (or have something clearly change colors) on the discussion list view to indicate we have made a post/reply in that discussion. It makes it so much easier to see what we have posted in and what we have simply read. And to differentiate topic with similar names without having to read them all to see which we actually have posted in and which we have not.

mcmcsalot10/22/2013, 7:20:33 PM1 votes

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