Feature request: A better way to navigate unread comments in a thread
I've found that the red (X new) indicator next to a thread's comment count on the main page keeps me coming back to the discussion to see the latest messages. This is a good thing, but the UX for actually navigating through those messages leaves something to be desired.
There are two relevant existing features I'd like to discuss:
- All new comments since I last viewed the thread are highlighted with a conspicuous red stripe.
- The sidebar on any given discussion page has a link to jump to the most recent comment.
I use the most recent comment link in threads that I know only have one new comment. The link takes me right to it. But in threads with more than one new comment, it's a lot less foolproof. My only method for seeing them all is to scroll down the page and stop when I see a flash of that red stripe. This is tedious in busy discussions which both update frequently with new comments to read, and take a long time to scroll through every time I check them. It's also easy to miss something this way, and since comments are considered "read" after you load the page, there's no second chance to see whatever I missed.
I'd like to propose a method for iterating through all unread comments on a page, either in chronological order (oldest first) or in order of appearance on the page. Or if @Deimos wants to get really fancy, some kind of hybrid sort that keeps nested comment chains grouped together for contextual continuity when navigating.
This would require two controls: "Jump to next unread comment" and "Jump to previous unread comment." These could be "sticky" clickable icons on the page, or just some sort of keystroke (like , and . for previous and next, respectively) without a UI at all.
An important secondary feature of this would be a count indicating both how many unread comments are on the page and how many within that set you have jumped to with this mechanism so far:
Viewing 2 of 7 unread comments
This could remain visible or only appear briefly when jumping to the next/previous unread, then fade away. It could also be shortened to something more minimal:
2/7
That on-screen feedback would help prevent getting lost in busy threads with high unread counts, particular if the sequence is not determined by order of comment appearance on the page.
Edit: Whoops, fixed my formatting error I didn't notice after posting.
Deimos has talked about it before and said this feature is definitely coming eventually, although he mentioned wanting it to simply auto-hide/collapse all but the new comments and their parent comment for context, rather than a navigation button. I can't find the gitlab issue for it anymore though.
Until it's added, I would recommend Crius' Tildes Extended browser extension which has this feature. It's what I use and it's great:
https://tildes.net/~tildes/1y8/repost_extension_tildes_extended
in the spirit of K.I.S.S we could mark new comments with
(new)in the comment header. Then you could just for ctrl-f(new)and cycle through that way.I'm not convinced that messing with the comment tree would be easy to understand.
There are already two issues regarding comment highlighting btw. One for an option to set custom highlighting range and one to allow re-ordering of comments without clearing highlighting.
This is something I've been thinking about recently. I'd personally like to have links with the past X most recent comments on the sidebar, as opposed to just the single most recent.
That line of thinking is what led me to this feature request. I realized that large threads could easily have 100+ unread comments in them. If you put links to all of them in the sidebar, you have a huge messy list that’s arguably as hard to navigate as the comment thread itself. But if you truncate it to show only links to the 5-10 most recent comments, there are still 90+ that you’ll miss.
I think having controls to move forward or backward through the stack is ultimately preferable to just displaying the stack.
Why not a “show new replies only” button?
Because you probably want context for those replies as well.
I suppose you could make all threads/subthreads without new comments collapsed and floated downward, which would work (EDIT: and may actually be a more user-friendly solution), but would take a bit more work to code in.