12
votes
Ignore comment thread?
Sometimes a comment thread is very very toxic/controversial and I would like to avoid getting sucked into it. Just because my decision-making is much better at 2pm than it is at 2am. I understand I can and should exercise self-control, and I'm working on it, I assure you! In the meantime, if at all possible, it would be nice to remove certain comments from my view, along with its children. Thanks!
The tricky part of a feature like this is that I think anyone using it would expect that it would do a bunch of things that are kind of difficult.
For example, if you ignore a particular thread, you probably also don't want the new-comments counter to increase for replies inside that thread, but still increase for comments in other threads inside the same topic. You probably also wouldn't want the topic to bump back to the top of your Activity sort when there are replies in that thread, because you're specifically trying not to see them.
Those are both difficult though. Right now, the new comment count is basically just "number of comments in the topic now minus number of comments in it the last time I looked at the comments page". It can't be that simple any more if certain comments have to be excluded from the count. Similarly, the ordering of topics in Activity sort is the same for all users. Users might see a different set of topics, but the relative ordering is always the same. Having Ignore affect that means we have to start adjusting the sorting for individual users somehow.
Those types of problems aren't unsolvable or anything, but they're not necessarily simple.
Hmm... I'm surprised this wasn't in the Gitlab issues yet, since I'm sure it was previously discussed at one point. In any case, added to Gitlab now:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/727
The previous issue got closed a while ago
Ah, right... the ideas were kinda combined in that initial notifications related issue. I probably should have made a new one specifically for comment/thread ignoring when I closed the old issue. Whoops! :P
A decent amount of people suggested this when the ignore feature was introduced.
You also seem to be a pretty prolific poster. I imagine if I posted as much as you, I might also want a feature like this. As it stands, for me, though, this only really applies when I make the mistake of commenting on a spicy post.
My current solution to that situation is to take a break from checking my replies for a few days, and when I get back, just hit "mark all as read" and start over clean. This may not be considerate to any long-winded replies I got, but my mental health is on the line lol.
As you say, my 2pm self often suffers at the hands of my 2am self.
Hey, that's my move! Whenever I actually comment on something, I start thinking something along the lines of, "that post makes you an asshole because of x, y, and z," then ignore comments until I don't care enough to be neurotic about it anymore. It's great. Anyway, good luck to you all, see you in a few days
Given the amount of posts I've been creating recently, that's not a very common occurrence. It's just a nice to have. Thanks for the suggestion.