Looks pretty cool so far. I assume there will be distinct categories/topics? I don't want to see awesome serious Jupiter spinning in a hallway .gifs mixed in with my UHF .gifs.
It does feel odd to click a chat bubble in a forum. The preview is a bit disorienting at first, but it's nice to see an image link preview before submitting. Overall, I like the clean look and it is fast. I'll pop back in this thread after playing for a few days and let you know if anything seems really counter-intuitive.
It feels a bit sparse to me. I'm a fan of the nested color changing bubbles for comments. It's the difference between the default reddit appearance and using the Reddit Enhancement Suite. Comments are more clearly delineated rather than appearing as paragraphs.
Can we please change the default for thread notifications to 'off' now that there are people here? I woke up to my phone having a sound seizure. I went through and unchecked the box for the popular threads, but I have to now uncheck every time I leave a comment.
Although I do like the format, I am not a huge fan of all the white/light gray. It strains my eyes a bit. I am very excited that this is now up and running! You guys did a great job.
I second that it feels a tad on the sparse side. On the one hand I like the minimalism. On the other hand the white background with grey lettering to denote who said what is causing eye strain. Also, I wish the little stars were a bit bigger. I totally missed them the first time around when browsing the forums because of the color blending into the background.
@capguncowboy@thumperchick@bluejester Thanks for the feedback. My thought in keeping the site minimalist, and reducing chrome and colors is to let the content have the focus. I really want what you all post to become the experience here and basically have any structure of the forum fade into the background.
You are, of course, welcome to post colorful imagery:
@bluejester We were talking this morning about changing the name of reply to "add a note", and adding a reply button that works a little differently - it'd start a new comment, leading with an @ username (like this is).
In general, I'd much rather have conversation going on in comments, and leave replies to quick little notes (like "sounds good" or "Thanks, I'll do that.") that are so minor, they'd be a little silly as standalone comments.
A little off topic. At the bottom of the page is a plus sign in a blue box to comment. It looks like there might be something else under the plus sign but it's not showing up for me.
It appears that if you check the box titled "Notify me when someone comments on this topic" that you'll get an email for EVERY comment made in the thread.
I clicked it thinking it would only send me an email if someone replied to my comment. It's not a big deal now that I've discovered the unsubsribe option, but perhaps change the wording a bit and have it default to unchecked?
The grayed-out star next to comments is almost impossible to see on my laptop screen. It looks like the number is just floating out there all on its own. On hover and once it's clicked, it's obvious, but the gray is too light for me to see without changing my viewing angle.
I don't have any problem with the preview next to the text box.
Agree with others that the light grey is too light. Also agree that I only should get an email when someone responds to my comment, not all comments in the main thread.
@mrmeh@capguncowboy Our hope was that most email programs do a pretty good job of grouping emails with the same subject together, but I can see it being overwhelming on the bigger threads. I'll talk with @Shawn to see if we should uncheck by default or if we can think of any other solution.
I'm new here, but so far I think it looks pretty good. My only complaint is that the replies to comments seem to all blur together because of the light color and close spacing. It might help to more clearly differentiate between the reply and the byline (change the shade/indent/font size?). Unless the user has an employee icon before their username, the reply and "xx replied last tuesday" runs together too easily.
I sorta feel like I'm reading signs after a bad snow storm and the sun came out. I'm about to go snow-blind. I had to turn down the brightness on my screen. But now it looks all grey and blah. Better, but it's still bothering me. Do you want people sitting around sporting their ray bans to log in ? Or is that the next secret experiment ? Mailing out special glasses for rats to wear. Not only will you determine the effects of glasses on internet use, when rats go out in the world they will know each other by their glasses. Secret society and all that. That doesn't seem very mediocre.
I have a few ideas, but I'm not sure of their feasibility:
Sorting/Filtering Right now, the comments are sorted chronologically, but it would be nice to have different type of filters and sorting options..
Trending I feel like it could be really cool to have color coded trending. For instance, you could have Blue, Yellow, Red (reference: Lame, Mediocre, Hot), based on the relative popularity of the post.
A post can be color coded (or it could have a small color dot next to it). I'm not sure how possible it is to get real time metrics, but once there are many posts, I think it would be an interesting feature to track posts as they become popular.
Underlining As far as I can tell, there is no way to underline text when posting (I tried _ TEXT _), but that italicized. There is no underline button? This may be to avoid confusion with hyperlinks?
White Space It seems like there is a lot of white space on the right hand side. If there will be advertisements there, I understand, if not, I think there needs to be a better usage of the space.
Replying to Replies It seems like you cannot reply specifically to a reply? Once the comments pile in, it seems like replies to replies will get lost...
Star System How come you cannot give stars to replies? Will there be a way to downvote? The only reason I bring up downvoting is to even out groups of people that may try to artificially upvote certain posts (even if they are unworthy).
Comments I noticed that the comment box opens over the bottom comment(s). I think it would be nice to be able to scroll lower when the comments box is open (especially if you are referencing that last post).
Pretty brave passing on avatars. Thinking about adding those later or planning on keeping things clean?
Also, may just be me but I wasn't totally convinced I was replying to a topic when adding a comment via the + tab at the bottom. Overall, I like the simple approach with focus on typography (what little there is on the web).
@james, Yes. We'd like to add avatars here, but we haven't found an approach that meets all our goals. Here's some notes from the team right out of the GitHub repo:
We need to implement a solution for avatars that accomplishes three goals - Easy identification of users in a quick scan of the page (without need of reading username) - Provide the user with a feeling of customization/personalization - Be able to, at a glance, understand that user's reputation within the community
We could simply use Gravatar or let you upload your own to accomplish the first two... but I'm interested in trying to come up with something simple to accomplish the third goal.
@whynottry, Wow, thanks for your thoughts. Great feedback! Let me respond to each bullet point:
Sorting/Filtering We've talked about sorting options for the topics list page but haven't really discussed them much for the topic details page to sort/filter comments. What kinds of options would be helpful? We've built out these types of features in the past on other sites, tracked their usage, and were disappointed with how much they were actually being used. It's like the idea of being able to sort/filter provided comfort but actually offered little utility.
Trending Real time metrics wouldn't be an issue. We've done popularity algorithms in the past. In your scenario, what would you look at to determine if a topic if lame, mediocre, or hot? We've tried to provide enough context on the topic list page for you to tell at a glance how much attention a topic is getting (# of stars, # of comments, time since last comment). I bet @dave would like to have some sort of subtle infographic as the background of each topic (maybe shows up on hover).
Underlining Interesting point. I never really thought of underlining, but I bet you're right. Not having underlines avoids confusion with hyperlinks. Either way, we're using standard Markdown with some extensions that we've open sourced called Mehdown.
White Space The comments used to take up the full 960px in width. We found it hard to read probably because it was longer than 50-60 characters per line. So, yeah... what should we put in that space?
Replying to Replies We recently changed "replies" to "add a note" to better indicate we're intending this feature to be used for small "thanks", or "you have a typo", or "broken link" type posts that we wouldn't want cluttering up the other comments. Don't think we want to encourage another level of notes so that we avoid deep nesting.
Star System Read note above about replies to replies. Since "notes" are really second-class citizens we decided to opt them out of a few things, including most email notifications (except @username mentions), updating the topics last comment date, and stars. Seems simpler that way. Make sense? Oh, and downvoting? It's anecdotal, but seems like most people are against downvoting because they feel it brings too much negativity into the community. From a programmer standpoint I like downvoting because it provides me with an additional signal about what content people like and dislike.
Comments Good point about the comment box. As a workaround, you can simply hit the tab again or press ESC and we'll hide the comment box. Then you can open it back up again when you're ready.
Thanks again for your comments. We're winding down the amount of forum tweaks in the interest of focusing more time on our ecommerce experiments, but your thoughts help us to prioritize how much more work we should be doing here.
@shawn, brainstorming: "choose-your-parts" avatar character builder with a transparent background, behind which lies a colored square indicating the user's rep group. Or the same idea with the avatar character holding up its rep score number.
@whynottry, What @Shawn said, but I also wanted to just say thanks for the very thoughtful feedback. We've been thinking about most of what you've suggested here and you have to make some tough decisions that are certainly not perfect.
In the feature spectrum, we've tried to stay on the quick and simple side to avoid never shipping and increasing amounts of clutter. There's certainly compromises there, and we're hardly completely consistent, but I feel like we've ended up with a usable system that hopefully has enough features to support a community (or, eventually, several).
And re: the forum features, design decisions and avatars (@c and @james, as well as @whynottry and, hey, @shawn), a primary goal here is to fade everything back and let the actual content of the posts and comments take highest priority.
One challenge with avatars (especially those that allow enough freedom to feel self-identifying and offer any amount of reputation information) is that they're likely to need to be large and colorful, and by default will draw a lot of visual attention.
I do feel like personalization and identification are extremely important in creating a sense of a community (helping to recognize the regulars, identify new people, and even get a feel for a person's personality), so they seem necessary, but I'm still ruminating on if it's possible to accomplish that while keeping them on the smaller and quieter side.
I will say this: It'd be great if there were an option to turn off notifications after you make a post, especially if you forgot to uncheck the option. I forgot to do that in the "What's Your Number" thread, and I get e-mails every hour or so. It's not immediately apparent how to turn off notifications.
Occasionally I noticed replying/posting a comment just hangs. I haven't had developer tools running when it happens, but right now it's "Waiting for mediocre.com..." and this is the 3rd time I've seen this.
@Alien88 We were just in the middle of rolling out an update so that was most likely the cause.
We're still working on a lot of changes and pushing them out quickly so I wouldn't be surprised if that was the reason it's happened the other times as well, but keep us updated if you find it happening a lot.
I also find the brightness of the white wearing. I like the voids on the sides and would rather it didn't get cluttered with miscellany. Something no one else mentioned, I can read the comments without difficulty but need my glasses to read the replies. The font difference is a bit extreme.
I am reading on an iPad... I noticed that there were options not visible when using the iPad upright. The header cuts off and is blank if you slide the screen to the right side. I did not notice until I was holding the screen sideways and started wondering if the stuff was new. Turn back and gone again.
I do like the font and I can easily zoom and read the smaller print if I want. Jury is still out on the star system.
I like the ideas posted about avatars so far. I tend to base more on content of comments rather than any rating system I have seen so far. User name or avatar that I like or dislike in the past will entice me to read or skip the post. New poster will get a few reads to determine which category the future posts will get.
Just a thought, but perhaps have a "say it" box at the top, or a jump-to-the-end button, so we don't have to scroll all the way down. Or did I miss this? Otherwise, looks good, and my other thoughts have already been covered.
It is kind of weird that this thread from 11/6/2013 cropped back up to the top once someone commented on it.
Also, I don't understand the sorting of the comments, unless it just goes in chronological order.
And a third, what about extra nesting? ie, when someone responds to this comment, and I respond back to them--it would be nice to be able to actually 'respond' to them so that they either get notified, or see the train of conversation.
But, after all, this was asked back in November, so maybe it doesn't matter anyway.
@luvche21 We were doing some updates to the forums and the sorting of the topics got a bit jumbled up so older threads popped up to the top for a while. Someone happened to respond to this one so it got refreshed before the jumbling was fixed.
The sorting of the comments in a thread is chronological, oldest at the top and newest on the bottom. As @ignorant said above, if you click on the timestamp under a thread it'll take you directly to the last posted comment.
The best way to directly respond to people (in comments or replies) is to use the @ mentions like I did in this post, if you go to your Account Page there is an option to be emailed whenever you get @ mentioned.
I don't know if it would be too complicated, but I suggest comments and replies that are "new" (less than 24 hours old or some such) be highlighted or in a different font color. I understand and agree with the reasoning behind the nesting of replies. But when I return to a thread, if I want to read everything new I have to read everything, because there is new material buried in replies to older comments,
I said this in another comment, but the preview to the right of the text entry box seems a little weird on first impressions.
I really like it, and it's snappy for me. But either I've had a head injury this morning or the fonts look odd.
Navigation (to get back to the forum) is basically unusable on an iPhone. This happens:
Outside of that, I really kinda dig it.
Get an android
(yes, I realise that doesn't work so well)
Looks pretty cool so far. I assume there will be distinct categories/topics? I don't want to see awesome serious Jupiter spinning in a hallway .gifs mixed in with my UHF .gifs.
bumping ancient threads to the top when new activity happens in them could, ultimately, be annoying.
Chrome does odd things with the font rendering (right) compared to FF (left)
It does feel odd to click a chat bubble in a forum. The preview is a bit disorienting at first, but it's nice to see an image link preview before submitting.
Overall, I like the clean look and it is fast. I'll pop back in this thread after playing for a few days and let you know if anything seems really counter-intuitive.
Ok, personal pet peeve. Clicking a link in the forum does NOT currently open that link in a new tab.
Huh, I saw that in @shawn's change log, but I guess I didn't try it. Let's try this: http://twitter.com/mediocrelabs
@thumperchick That link (^ up there ^) opened in a new tab for me. You?
@dave - It is working for me now.
I'm not sure if it was by design... but replies to comments in a thread do not bump the thread up, or show the replier as "last commented."
Yeah, for now that's the design. We're thinking of replies as definitely worth less than actual comments.
@dave do they result in emails to those following the thread?
@snapster No, unless you mention someone by name. The original commenter gets emails, though (if opted in).
It feels a bit sparse to me. I'm a fan of the nested color changing bubbles for comments. It's the difference between the default reddit appearance and using the Reddit Enhancement Suite. Comments are more clearly delineated rather than appearing as paragraphs.
Too lazy to see if someone's mentioned it, but I'd like to be able to set the default for various notifications. Maybe it's already a feature...
It's not a huge priority for me though because of GMail's BACN filtering.
Can we please change the default for thread notifications to 'off' now that there are people here? I woke up to my phone having a sound seizure.
I went through and unchecked the box for the popular threads, but I have to now uncheck every time I leave a comment.
I figured it out, so it can't be that bad. Why am I typing this over there->>>
I did figure it out quickly enough but I admit to being partial to classic forum look - categories and lists of threads when you go into the category.
That said, this does have a fancy modern Swedish-Minimalist look to it that all the cool tech companies have these days so, yeah that.
Although I do like the format, I am not a huge fan of all the white/light gray. It strains my eyes a bit. I am very excited that this is now up and running! You guys did a great job.
Some color might be nice. I definitely like it more than the tired old deals page at that other site.
I like the minimalist look going on, but the mellow color scheme will probably cause some eye fatigue if you spend a lot of time here.
I second that it feels a tad on the sparse side. On the one hand I like the minimalism. On the other hand the white background with grey lettering to denote who said what is causing eye strain. Also, I wish the little stars were a bit bigger. I totally missed them the first time around when browsing the forums because of the color blending into the background.
Other than that, not too shabby.
I was thinking about making the stars bigger, so I might be able to use this as an excuse to do that.
@capguncowboy @thumperchick @bluejester
Thanks for the feedback. My thought in keeping the site minimalist, and reducing chrome and colors is to let the content have the focus. I really want what you all post to become the experience here and basically have any structure of the forum fade into the background.
You are, of course, welcome to post colorful imagery:
All I see is that you want more ponies.
How about stars for replies as well? Is there no way to reply to replies in my own comment tree?
@bluejester We were talking this morning about changing the name of reply to "add a note", and adding a reply button that works a little differently - it'd start a new comment, leading with an @ username (like this is).
In general, I'd much rather have conversation going on in comments, and leave replies to quick little notes (like "sounds good" or "Thanks, I'll do that.") that are so minor, they'd be a little silly as standalone comments.
I like that idea. "Add a note" and the new "reply" behavior would be much clearer.
A little off topic. At the bottom of the page is a plus sign in a blue box to comment. It looks like there might be something else under the plus sign but it's not showing up for me.
Ah yes, a speech bubble. I'll have to see why that's word wrapping for you. Probably text size increased?
It appears that if you check the box titled "Notify me when someone comments on this topic" that you'll get an email for EVERY comment made in the thread.
I clicked it thinking it would only send me an email if someone replied to my comment. It's not a big deal now that I've discovered the unsubsribe option, but perhaps change the wording a bit and have it default to unchecked?
That is all. Thanks!
The grayed-out star next to comments is almost impossible to see on my laptop screen. It looks like the number is just floating out there all on its own. On hover and once it's clicked, it's obvious, but the gray is too light for me to see without changing my viewing angle.
I don't have any problem with the preview next to the text box.
There are two users listed in this thread's fave title, but the count is 0.
...aaaaand it's correct now.
I've got some ideas on how to make the star more visible. We might get them out tonight.
Agree with others that the light grey is too light. Also agree that I only should get an email when someone responds to my comment, not all comments in the main thread.
@mrmeh @capguncowboy Our hope was that most email programs do a pretty good job of grouping emails with the same subject together, but I can see it being overwhelming on the bigger threads. I'll talk with @Shawn to see if we should uncheck by default or if we can think of any other solution.
A little late to the party, but does the markdown formatting work like that "other" place did?
That was BBCode, I think. This is markdown-ish, so like: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ with a couple changes.
Specifically Markdown plus some extensions that we've open sourced over @ https://github.com/mediocre/mehdown
I'm new here, but so far I think it looks pretty good. My only complaint is that the replies to comments seem to all blur together because of the light color and close spacing. It might help to more clearly differentiate between the reply and the byline (change the shade/indent/font size?). Unless the user has an employee icon before their username, the reply and "xx replied last tuesday" runs together too easily.
Yeah, I can see that when there's piles of notes. It's good to have some real content to now check the design on.
I sorta feel like I'm reading signs after a bad snow storm and the sun came out. I'm about to go snow-blind.
I had to turn down the brightness on my screen. But now it looks all grey and blah. Better, but it's still bothering me.
Do you want people sitting around sporting their ray bans to log in ? Or is that the next secret experiment ? Mailing out special glasses for rats to wear. Not only will you determine the effects of glasses on internet use, when rats go out in the world they will know each other by their glasses. Secret society and all that.
That doesn't seem very mediocre.
what forum software are you using or is this a homebrew?
@drbillnye, I built it with love in St. Louis using Node.js, Express, Restify, and MongoDB... running on Windows Azure
I think this forum looks great!
I have a few ideas, but I'm not sure of their feasibility:
Sorting/Filtering
Right now, the comments are sorted chronologically, but it would be nice to have different type of filters and sorting options..
Trending
I feel like it could be really cool to have color coded trending. For instance, you could have Blue, Yellow, Red (reference: Lame, Mediocre, Hot), based on the relative popularity of the post.
A post can be color coded (or it could have a small color dot next to it). I'm not sure how possible it is to get real time metrics, but once there are many posts, I think it would be an interesting feature to track posts as they become popular.
Underlining
As far as I can tell, there is no way to underline text when posting (I tried _ TEXT _), but that italicized. There is no underline button? This may be to avoid confusion with hyperlinks?
White Space
It seems like there is a lot of white space on the right hand side. If there will be advertisements there, I understand, if not, I think there needs to be a better usage of the space.
Replying to Replies
It seems like you cannot reply specifically to a reply? Once the comments pile in, it seems like replies to replies will get lost...
Star System
How come you cannot give stars to replies? Will there be a way to downvote? The only reason I bring up downvoting is to even out groups of people that may try to artificially upvote certain posts (even if they are unworthy).
Comments
I noticed that the comment box opens over the bottom comment(s). I think it would be nice to be able to scroll lower when the comments box is open (especially if you are referencing that last post).
Thanks -- keep up the good work!
Pretty brave passing on avatars. Thinking about adding those later or planning on keeping things clean?
Also, may just be me but I wasn't totally convinced I was replying to a topic when adding a comment via the + tab at the bottom. Overall, I like the simple approach with focus on typography (what little there is on the web).
@james, Yes. We'd like to add avatars here, but we haven't found an approach that meets all our goals. Here's some notes from the team right out of the GitHub repo:
We could simply use Gravatar or let you upload your own to accomplish the first two... but I'm interested in trying to come up with something simple to accomplish the third goal.
You could have colored frames on the avatars, the frame color reflects the user's current reputation.
@whynottry, Wow, thanks for your thoughts. Great feedback! Let me respond to each bullet point:
Sorting/Filtering
We've talked about sorting options for the topics list page but haven't really discussed them much for the topic details page to sort/filter comments. What kinds of options would be helpful? We've built out these types of features in the past on other sites, tracked their usage, and were disappointed with how much they were actually being used. It's like the idea of being able to sort/filter provided comfort but actually offered little utility.
Trending
Real time metrics wouldn't be an issue. We've done popularity algorithms in the past. In your scenario, what would you look at to determine if a topic if lame, mediocre, or hot? We've tried to provide enough context on the topic list page for you to tell at a glance how much attention a topic is getting (# of stars, # of comments, time since last comment). I bet @dave would like to have some sort of subtle infographic as the background of each topic (maybe shows up on hover).
Underlining
Interesting point. I never really thought of underlining, but I bet you're right. Not having underlines avoids confusion with hyperlinks. Either way, we're using standard Markdown with some extensions that we've open sourced called Mehdown.
White Space
The comments used to take up the full 960px in width. We found it hard to read probably because it was longer than 50-60 characters per line. So, yeah... what should we put in that space?
Replying to Replies
We recently changed "replies" to "add a note" to better indicate we're intending this feature to be used for small "thanks", or "you have a typo", or "broken link" type posts that we wouldn't want cluttering up the other comments. Don't think we want to encourage another level of notes so that we avoid deep nesting.
Star System
Read note above about replies to replies. Since "notes" are really second-class citizens we decided to opt them out of a few things, including most email notifications (except @username mentions), updating the topics last comment date, and stars. Seems simpler that way. Make sense? Oh, and downvoting? It's anecdotal, but seems like most people are against downvoting because they feel it brings too much negativity into the community. From a programmer standpoint I like downvoting because it provides me with an additional signal about what content people like and dislike.
Comments
Good point about the comment box. As a workaround, you can simply hit the tab again or press ESC and we'll hide the comment box. Then you can open it back up again when you're ready.
Thanks again for your comments. We're winding down the amount of forum tweaks in the interest of focusing more time on our ecommerce experiments, but your thoughts help us to prioritize how much more work we should be doing here.
@shawn, brainstorming: "choose-your-parts" avatar character builder with a transparent background, behind which lies a colored square indicating the user's rep group. Or the same idea with the avatar character holding up its rep score number.
Neat!
@whynottry, What @Shawn said, but I also wanted to just say thanks for the very thoughtful feedback. We've been thinking about most of what you've suggested here and you have to make some tough decisions that are certainly not perfect.
In the feature spectrum, we've tried to stay on the quick and simple side to avoid never shipping and increasing amounts of clutter. There's certainly compromises there, and we're hardly completely consistent, but I feel like we've ended up with a usable system that hopefully has enough features to support a community (or, eventually, several).
And re: the forum features, design decisions and avatars (@c and @james, as well as @whynottry and, hey, @shawn), a primary goal here is to fade everything back and let the actual content of the posts and comments take highest priority.
One challenge with avatars (especially those that allow enough freedom to feel self-identifying and offer any amount of reputation information) is that they're likely to need to be large and colorful, and by default will draw a lot of visual attention.
I do feel like personalization and identification are extremely important in creating a sense of a community (helping to recognize the regulars, identify new people, and even get a feel for a person's personality), so they seem necessary, but I'm still ruminating on if it's possible to accomplish that while keeping them on the smaller and quieter side.
I will say this: It'd be great if there were an option to turn off notifications after you make a post, especially if you forgot to uncheck the option. I forgot to do that in the "What's Your Number" thread, and I get e-mails every hour or so. It's not immediately apparent how to turn off notifications.
@BillLehecka, I see this in the email - http://cl.ly/image/230j411c2J1k unsub from this topic,
Occasionally I noticed replying/posting a comment just hangs. I haven't had developer tools running when it happens, but right now it's "Waiting for mediocre.com..." and this is the 3rd time I've seen this.
@Alien88 We were just in the middle of rolling out an update so that was most likely the cause.
We're still working on a lot of changes and pushing them out quickly so I wouldn't be surprised if that was the reason it's happened the other times as well, but keep us updated if you find it happening a lot.
@jont hopefully Alien88 hasn't been sitting around waiting for that since November 27th. If he has been, give him a forum award of some type
@snapster Oh, I've been waiting. I was wondering when the rollout would finally be complete! ;)
Vindication! My streak of no forum rewards being...awarded remains intact.
I also find the brightness of the white wearing. I like the voids on the sides and would rather it didn't get cluttered with miscellany. Something no one else mentioned, I can read the comments without difficulty but need my glasses to read the replies. The font difference is a bit extreme.
I increase font size on just about every site I visit. Don't know about other browsers, but chrome remembers the setting per-site.
I am reading on an iPad... I noticed that there were options not visible when using the iPad upright. The header cuts off and is blank if you slide the screen to the right side. I did not notice until I was holding the screen sideways and started wondering if the stuff was new. Turn back and gone again.
I do like the font and I can easily zoom and read the smaller print if I want. Jury is still out on the star system.
I like the ideas posted about avatars so far. I tend to base more on content of comments rather than any rating system I have seen so far. User name or avatar that I like or dislike in the past will entice me to read or skip the post. New poster will get a few reads to determine which category the future posts will get.
Back to lurking...
Just a thought, but perhaps have a "say it" box at the top, or a jump-to-the-end button, so we don't have to scroll all the way down. Or did I miss this? Otherwise, looks good, and my other thoughts have already been covered.
There is a link under the thread topic "last comment 1 hour ago" that'll take you to the last comment.
I missed it too :)
Thanks, @ignorant! (It feels like I'm insulting you with the tag...)
In the banner, the far right icon will allow you to add to a thread or start a new thread, depending on context.
@okham now there's no need for name calling. :)
@ignorant:
It is kind of weird that this thread from 11/6/2013 cropped back up to the top once someone commented on it.
Also, I don't understand the sorting of the comments, unless it just goes in chronological order.
And a third, what about extra nesting? ie, when someone responds to this comment, and I respond back to them--it would be nice to be able to actually 'respond' to them so that they either get notified, or see the train of conversation.
But, after all, this was asked back in November, so maybe it doesn't matter anyway.
It didn't matter in November. Perhaps it's more important with larger user base, but was less important than other things.
@luvche21 We were doing some updates to the forums and the sorting of the topics got a bit jumbled up so older threads popped up to the top for a while. Someone happened to respond to this one so it got refreshed before the jumbling was fixed.
The sorting of the comments in a thread is chronological, oldest at the top and newest on the bottom. As @ignorant said above, if you click on the timestamp under a thread it'll take you directly to the last posted comment.
The best way to directly respond to people (in comments or replies) is to use the @ mentions like I did in this post, if you go to your Account Page there is an option to be emailed whenever you get @ mentioned.
Hope that helps!
not the timestamp... the "Comment" link:
Clicking the timestamp from the main forum page also works!
d'oh
Some kind of navigation to get back to the forum from the bottom of the page without needing to scroll would be aces.
I don't know if it would be too complicated, but I suggest comments and replies that are "new" (less than 24 hours old or some such) be highlighted or in a different font color. I understand and agree with the reasoning behind the nesting of replies. But when I return to a thread, if I want to read everything new I have to read everything, because there is new material buried in replies to older comments,
Yes, it takes too long to go through the whole thread to see if there's something you haven't already read.
How about we bold the byline that reads "moondrake said 11 minutes ago"?
those are actually hard to spot when you're scanning the page
Any chance the replies to comments could be expanded beyond 140 characters or is that a deliberate choice to keep things more twitter-like?
The direct replies are meant more for short and quick thoughts. Go ahead and use full comments with @ mentions if you need to say more.
We may add in an "upgrade this to a full comment" type button so you can switch if you end up realizing you need more space.
But then you lose the chronological quasi-threading