[SITE UPDATE] Flat, Chronological view

RiotKrylhos·3/6/2014, 2:47:03 AM·14 votes·2,678 views

Greetings summoners,

As promised, we rolled out a super simple pass at providing a way to view comment threads in a flat, chronological fashion. This should feel similar to what you would experience within consuming comments within vBulletin.

We won't be spending a lot of time in enhancing this view (we will patch up bugs within it, of course) as we still strongly feel that a well-presented nested conversation is a better experience for larger conversations.

Remember - this is a beta experience. All things are subject to change!

As always, open and constructive criticism / feedback is accepted and appreciated.

Thanks!

22 Comments

Verandure3/6/2014, 3:09:12 AM5 votes

I appreciate ya'll taking the time to implement a feature that is antithetical to your original intent. It shows how highly you consider the feedback of users.

That said, there are a couple downfalls of this system:

Without generations; discussions are a linear mass of non-sequitur gibberish. The only way to fix this would be to have the immediate parent of a post indented above it -- in the vBulletin format. While this increases bandwidth needed (by having copies of the same post multiple times throughout a discussion) it would fix the issue of context with the view. Further additions to the system would be using a "snippet" feature that reduces the amount of text for the parents as much as possible (of course, no post would directly quote the original post).

Other than this, I honestly have no other negatives for furthering this feature.

MackleDoge3/6/2014, 2:53:42 AM1 votes

I appreciate this. However, I'm having an issue with the system actually working. I'll open a thread and select the "show as flat" but nothing happens. The page isn't updated nor is the comments section. Furthermore when I open that link in a new tap, the original thread exists and there is a small comment saying that you are testing a new feature per community request, but no comments from the thread are shown in the comment section.

Thought you'd like to know that. Anyone else having this issue or discover what I'm doing wrong?

EDIT I just discovered that selecting "show nested discussion" after opening the broken flat mode view will appropriately reload the page and display the thread's comments in nested format. (I smell conspiracy XD) just kidding don't kill me

ModCaptainMårvelous3/6/2014, 2:57:05 AM1 votes

Testing flat discussion: Hi, how are you today? Is there anything about the flat discussion that greatly changes the way things are used here?

EDIT: Apparently (not sure if this is on purpose) but the updating takes a second compared to the non-nested. Figured it's just due to the new format.

AbiwonKenabi3/6/2014, 4:24:08 AM1 votes

This feature is very appreciated! I'm really liking this so far! :D

Some English Guy3/6/2014, 7:35:29 AM1 votes

about time. So much better than the ugly clusterfuck of threaded replies within replies that just get lost in all the nonsense

daft inquisitor3/6/2014, 11:03:02 AM1 votes

I approve of this change!

...still really like the regular upvote/downvote view, though.

HalcyonicHS3/6/2014, 4:20:29 AM1 votes

Thank you. I much prefer the flat view compared to the nested one.

I do agree that some sort of indentation, or auto-quote feature would be needed to follow the discussion in case the discussion was originally being held in nested mode.