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

54 comments on Welcome to TOD 3.0!

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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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