Is it possible to implement a "threaded" view in addition to the "flat" view? It's one of the DPR forum features that would work really well.
2 years ago
21
I believe it is one of the enhancements that is being worked on.
Could a member of the forum team please comment on threaded view?
I find it hard to follow a discussion resp. thread in flat view.It would also be helpful if post could be identified as 'on topic' or 'personal reaction' (or similar). I guess that's impossible because there's no hard line to distinguish posts accordingly. I'm just not interested in reading which poster thinks who's a dumb forum user. Maybe the poster him/her-self can mark her/his post accordingly (with a button)?
I assume you're looking forward to the "ignore" button as much as I am?
I've never blocked anyone on a site before, but there are a few people here that just don't get it and will derail any thread they post on.
I've taken on threaded view as a personal project. It involves some quite major changes to the forum structure, so it won't be quick. We're trying to regular a release schedule, and it will go into a future release, hopefully near future.
A DPReview style 'ignore' button doesn't do that much - really just flags some users' activities in a darker colour. We have a feature in mind that might allow easy navigation past parts of threads that you don't want to look at.
It's not so much about an ignore button (= ignore member) but about not reading posts which have personal or offensive content.
With threaded view it's easier to select posts (by posters)
Thank you Bob for what y’all are doing here! The future is bright and look forward to threaded view and all the developments happening, quite amazing!
You know Bob, there may be something to the 150 reply limit.
I suspect all the threads here that have gone past 150 are full of 1-on-1 back-and-forth that really do nothing to enlighten or advance the premise put forth by the OP.
But some of them do then develop into useful threads.
Alan
What I'm working on isn't an exact analogue of DPReview's threaded view, but I think it will end up better. It's a combination of two features.
Feature 1 is 'compacted view'. Instead of showing the whole post, this will just show the header bar, which can be expanded to see the whole post (exact expansion mechanism to be determined)
Feature 2 is 'threaded order', which orders the posts by conversation rather than time.
This gives you four options, according to which order you like to view the posts and whether you prefer to see them or not.
I think that compacted + threaded gives the same as DPReview's 'threaded' but quicker and easier to traverse. Compacted by itself gives the same ability to ignore posts but to browse by time order, if you prefer.
In terms of the development process, the first job is to put in links in a post to the replied-to post. The SW doesn't do this at present. The second job is to put those links into DB relations so that threaded order can be constructed efficiently. That's the tricky bit. Third job is to do compacted view. They'll probably end up being releaes individually, because each one adds some useful functionality.We're trialling a different solution.
An example is the case where one of the disputants eventually 'got it' at about post 700. The content put in the Dumpster (about 100 posts) was posts complaining about how many posts there were....
Interesting and promising. Maybe I misunderstand, but individual posts don’t seem to have a header at present, only the OP of the thread has.
They get a 'header' - it's the stripe at the top - what they haven't got is a title. My idea was just to put in the first part of the substantive (non-quote) text, like this..
Possibly a bit more informative that a trail of 'Re:'
Good morning. That would make navigating threads and knowing what thread you're currently in so much less confusing.
Yes, that would e great
Sounds good, Thanks!!
I'm very much looking forward to that "threaded" view too.
At the moment it is quite confusing to look through a long thread and difficult to find a particular part of the discussion I want to reply to.
With a threaded view I could see if a comment, I might want to make to some "sub-thread", has already been answered in some later post by someone else.I regularly post in the "This week through your eyes" and with the new threaded view I could easily see which posts I have already replied to, or not yet replied to.
I'd also be able to see how many have replied to my post without having to search through the whole long thread each time.Thanks for your efforts on this, it sounds promising but complicated to implement
Thanks for the feedback. If it looks good, I'll carry on doing that way. It's actually in conflict with some of the other facilities in the forum. For instance, if you delete a post or move it, what happens to its successors? In DPReview the answers were simple. If a post got deleted, all the successors did as well, regardless of how much thought and effort their authors had put into them. And individual posts couldn't be moved to other threads, not could threads be split as they can here. So, implementing threaded view requires finding solutions to those issues. Then, what to do about legacy threads that don't have the links necessary for threaded view? I have a plan for that.
I've also an idea for anther view, particularly for photo threads. Call it 'gallery view', where the original photo posts will be kept at the top level so that you can just run through them in order, and follow down the comments on each as you wish.
In fact that’s my primary use of the threaded feature in dp review. 😁 It goes a long way towards discriminating the wheat from the chaff.
What’s really weird there is that in some threads when I open them it starts in flat view as if it was retaining the prior visitor’s preference. That’s not hard to deal with, it takes only a second, but it would be considered a bug.
I am just wondering if threaded view is enabled and I missed it ?
No, I don't think so.
Alan
