The Oil Drum

Many people have asked for the ability to fix typos in comments they've already posted. Of course "mischief" may ensue if people remove, from their own comments, sections that got criticized later. Besides, no more joking about freudian slips? Not sure what's the best approach. Perhaps one should at least be allowed to append text to ones own existing comment.

What, no more "auto-formatting"? I loved that feature! Who wants to type HTML tags?

Also, after hitting "post" it reloads the whole story, that's very very slow if there are lots of comments and one has a slow connection. The old way, giving a small "thank you for contributing" confirmation page, was much better. I then went back to, and refreshed, the story page later when I wanted to, rather than right away.

Another issue with the new TOD is that a long page doesn't all load at once, it breaks after a certain length and there's a "next" link on the bottom. I think that would make it harder to check on all new comments in a long discussion, since they would be scattered among the sub-pages, and one would need to load them all, manually. I'd rather see it as one big page. If that's not possible or acceptable, can a "user preferences" thingy be set up so that users can choose how long to make a page before breaking it?

Using the find function of the browser is easy in a given drumbeat, but if you're a prolific poster and have ten posts you're expecting to sprout comments, in five different threads, the utility of reloading five different pages and then reading downward from each rapidly diminishes. It's about seeing whether people have replied at a glance, rather than finding your own posts.

As I've noted before, the population and the volume of news items in Drumbeat (topical articles aren't so bad) are larger than can be accommodated comfortably in a restricted-blog setting. Checking the page that was removed is the only way we've been able to cope with long discussions.

I'd like to see a Drumbeat in a different form: a lone forum where Leanan posts news items individually that are stickied for 1 day, and are visible with a short description. Other people can make non-stickied posts. The rest of the forum self-orders based on date of last post, and below the top level, the posts are nested like they are now. So long major discussions can be had without fragmenting into two weeks of Drumbeats, people can post original content as they wish, people can reply to individual news items in an organized fashion, and readability is highly improved for those without much time on their hands.

I calls 'em as I sees 'em.  I'm neither exaggerating nor pulling punches, and I'm not alone.

This is a problem which could have been foreseen by examining the web server logs.  Lots of hits had to have been to user profiles, especially users' own profiles.  Lots of hits had to have been to comment sub-trees.  Nobody in the position to know asked what readers were using this for, and what would happen if it went away.

Nobody mentioned that it would go missing.  Users would have spoken up before the fact.

Now that we have this critical functionality discarded in the migration, Super G is hearing about it.  Well, his technical work is incredibly good, no doubt about that.  But this bespeaks a management failure, and if we're not supposed to tell management when something is wrong, we might as well give up on TOD.

We staff members were the beta-testers, so I guess you can blame us if some bugs slipped through.

I did notice the "order of comments" thing, and posted it to the beta site, in the thread in which I noticed it, but I guess I should have posted it to the thread SuperG set up for beta-testing discussion.

The no "your comments" thing is something that you don't really notice when you're playing with a dummy board and not actually having a real discussion. And I confess, I almost never used that function anyway.