<How to address Contrarian Arguments - part IIThe Oil DrumA quick technical update>

54 comments on Welcome to TOD 3.0!

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FTX on December 25, 2006 - 5:08am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

You just killed extended discussions on this site.

That better be on the to-do list...

I think you could have put this a little better, EP. However you regard your comment, I was somewhat stunned when I read it and clearly Super G took offence. Site migration is not for the faint-hearted, and inevitably there will always be issues that take time to sort out. To be so to aggressive towards someone who's given his unpaid time to implement this over the Christmas holiday period shows a surprising lack of tact, especially from someone who's listed as a TOD contributor.

Just an observation, but I'm willing to bet you're piqued by it. Well, now you know how Super G feels.

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Engineer-Poet on December 25, 2006 - 9:21am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

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.

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Super G on December 25, 2006 - 9:58am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Listen. This is a big site with a lot of functionality. I didn't expect to get everything right on the first try, which is why I did the upgrade on the lowest traffic day of the year. If you keep the comments constructive and lay off the melodrama, you might just get your precious feature by the end of the day.

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Hothgor on December 25, 2006 - 10:58am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Merry Christmas, Super G!

Thanks for all your hard work!

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Engineer-Poet on December 25, 2006 - 3:50pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

If you can manage this by the end of the day, you're freakin' awesome.

Heck, if you can manage it in a week I'll be pretty happy.  I just don't want anyone to underestimate just what it means for TOD's usability.

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Engineer-Poet on December 25, 2006 - 6:05pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I just went through the new comments links (that was quick!), and noticed that the critical part people have been crying for is missing:  a count of replies to the comment.

I hope that's coming.  If you're in a position to play Santa Claus, here's a wish-list:

  • Comment link which brings up a sub-tree, not all the comments for the story (same as 2.0).
  • Count of replies to the comment (same as 2.0).
  • A flag of some kind which indicates new replies since the thread was last viewed (new feature).

Some other things about the new user comments page:

  • The story author and story timestamp look to be a lot less useful than the legacy stuff - story title and link might be enough.
  • If you're going to construct comment subjects from the first few words of a comment (there is no explicit subject field) it might be worthwhile to use a smaller font size to save space for the other info - what other people have said to us is probably more worthy of screen space than what we said, which we ought to remember.
  • Would be great if the my-comments section was a link off the sidebar again, too.

And about comments themselves:

  • Making a comment shouldn't reload the whole page after posting.  If you've opened the reply link in a new tab or window, this marks a whole lot of possibly-unseen comments as "old".  If you make 3 comments in a thread, you would have to read the new-flagged comments in 3 separate pages... not fun.

I've got the feeling that things are going to be okay.  Whew!  What a relief.

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Leanan on December 25, 2006 - 9:36am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

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.

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dipchip on December 25, 2006 - 9:53am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I always thought the "your comments" thing was one of the finer aspects of the TOD

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Leanan on December 25, 2006 - 10:08am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I use "your comments" at dKos, but rarely used it at TOD. The number of articles posted at dKos is just so overwhelming (and the search engine so inadequate) that it was often the only way to even find a thread you were interested in. TOD is still small enough that I prefer to read the entire thread, not just the replies to my own posts. Just my preference; I realize YMMV.

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Engineer-Poet on December 25, 2006 - 10:50am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

In my case, this will be crippling for long threads.  FireFox has the mis-feature of running the rendering engine at a high enough priority that it freezes out the UI, including the mouse.  If I have some huge page rendering, I can literally not move the mouse (except in huge, infrequent jerks) until it's done.  Getting FF to switch tabs so I can read something else can take 10-20 seconds.  Loading only sub-trees is the way around this.  Was.

Going to my usual entry page at TOD and being told "Page not found"... that wasn't pleasant.

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paid troll on December 25, 2006 - 11:27am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

My favorite browser (under Windows) is Opera, lightweight, starts fast, supports tabs, etc. On Linux I use lynx, it is superfast :)

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