6
votes
Suggestion when linking to comments from a user's history page
Comments in a person's history page have a "Link" and "Parent" link on them.
My suggestion is have just a single link to the comment, but all other comments on the page that are not direct parents/ancestors or children/descendants of the linked to comment should be minimized so we can easily see the relevant discussion, but also view them if we want, and the linked comment itself should be highlighted in some way.
You could probably put a "Hide all but direct family" flag in the querystring
A reworking of permalinks so they aren't just HTML anchors (which AFAIK was just a stopgap) is already "in progress", so a lot of the problems you get with the current system are likely to disappear once it's implemented. And I imagine a
?context=#system, similar to reddit, will probably also be implemented eventually, which would likely satisfy this suggestion.p.s. Speaking of which, added to Gitlab:
Add ?context=# system for permalinks (once "seperate view" feature is implemented)
If tildes is going to do context as it works in reddit, I'd suggest not putting in an arbitrary maximum. I think the highest context that reddit can do is 10. I'd suggest allowing any number, and maybe using -1 to go all the way to the top level comment, no matter how deep the linked comment is.
I know it's not as big a deal with tildes' smaller user base, but I don't see any reason to limit it.
Reddit does it that way because of its "continue this thread" thing where it'll never show more than 10 levels of nesting on a page, and you have to click to view the next "section" of a deep thread on a new page so it can reset the nesting each time.
Tildes shouldn't need to have a limit because of the "flattening" method that's implemented instead, since that can handle any amount of nesting.
Yeah, the way ?context= works on reddit is rather rudimentary and it's a bit annoying having to manually type it into the URL every time. If/when it's implemented here I am sure we could try to improve it, and your suggestions are definitely good ones. If you have a gitlab account you should make a comment with your ideas on that issue I created, so anyone who decides to work on the feature can see them.
p.s. And if you don't have a gitlab account, I can add your suggestions to the issue myself if you want me to. Just let me know.