13
votes
Suggestion: list of recent comments in the topic sidebar (mockup inside)
See image for what I mean: https://imgur.com/BGzLKGq
Basically, it can be hard to track new comments made in an old topic. In the recent one about tulpas, I checked in every so often to follow ongoing discussions but had to keep skimming the entire topic every time just to spot the new comments.
If there could be a kind of "recent comments" in the sidebar, it would save a lot of time and make it much easier to stay on top of evolving discussions: just click the comments you haven't seen.
Do you have the mark new comments setting enabled?
What I'd really like to do is make it so that when you have that setting enabled, when you come back to a thread it will show only the new comments and their direct parents, with all other comments collapsed by default.
Can we have a button that just collapses all but the new comments? Seems like that's the simplest way to present it in the interface.
I was thinking more the opposite - when you enter the thread it's only new comments (and parents) visible by default, but with a button to uncollapse everything if you want.
I do like that better - 'expand all replies'.
If we ever try out that offtopic-tag-collapse idea I mentioned before, that'd be useful there as well, expanding the offtopic chains.
Anything that makes new comments easier to find would be fantastic. I love the site so far but this is one feature I feel is missing.
Even with "mark new comments" turned on, it can still be pretty time-consuming on mobile to try and find recent comments once a thread hits 50 or 60 replies.
Changing to "sorted by new" doesn't always help -- it makes new parent comments easy to locate, but new child comments actually become harder to find because the highlighting disappears when the thread refreshes.
(This comment feels pretty whingy, so let me just repeat that I really am enjoying this site!)
Agreed, I definitely have the same issue often. There's an extension (which probably won't help on mobile) that added a "jump to next new comment" button on each one, so you can just click through them all quickly using that. That's a pretty good approach to it as well.
Tildes Extended is the extension Deimos was talking about, fyi
Oh I didn't realize that was a feature. Toggled it on and hopefully it will help! Thanks.
I like your idea of collapsing all previously read comments and it's probably the better way to go. But if it turns out to be too complicated to implement, I think the comments in the sidebar would be a good fallback option.
We do intend to put that empty sidebar space to use one day, mostly I think with metadata related to the topic. I know how to do that for music groups but it'll evolve differently in other groups depending on their topic matter and what relevant information is readily available on the net.
Could that collapsing thing be optional? I know I like to go back and reread some chains once I've mulled them over and would hate to have to uncollapse all convos looking for the one or two that I wanted.
Probably. Even if not, like I said, I think we'd definitely want an "uncollapse all" button, so you wouldn't need to do it individually.