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indentation yet again?

is there any thought about how to replace the currently too-much-indenting style ui with something more friendly to long discussions?

By raould at 2010-01-20 01:22 | Site Discussion | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 7889 reads

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

I don't think we are going

I don't think we are going to do anything until we upgrade the infrastructure (Drupal). If someone can contribute his time/expertise, let me know.

By Ehud Lamm at Wed, 2010-01-20 06:16 | login or register to post comments

Upgrade may not be enough

I don't think Drupal's newer versions provide anything significant in terms of comment threading. There's a group for Forum Improvements which doesn't seem to have produced anything production-ready yet.

Doing significant custom work just for LtU - unless it's at the level of something like CSS - is not necessarily a great solution, because that work then needs to be maintained through Drupal upgrades, and makes upgrades more difficult.

If there were a maintained, production-quality Drupal module or other Drupal-compatible approach that would make more people happy, that'd be worth serious consideration.

By Anton van Straaten at Wed, 2010-01-20 06:48 | login or register to post comments

What problem are you seeing?

What problem are you seeing? If it's a screen width issue, what pixel width do you have? With the discussion you linked to, on a netbook with a 1280 pixel width, I don't see any obvious problems except a few narrow-column comments at the deepest nesting level on that page.

There are a few things you can do with the current UI: if you're on a very narrow screen or want to pretend you're reading a typical non-threaded blog, you can switch your comment viewing options to a flat list. Also, reducing the number of comments per page may help.

The members involved in a discussion can help by starting a new forum thread if discussion has drifted onto something tangential.

One possible change we could make would be to reduce the nesting depth a little, which can probably be done in CSS. But that will just push the problem back to even more deeply nested threads.

Regarding bigger customizations, see my reply to Ehud's comment.

By Anton van Straaten at Wed, 2010-01-20 06:36 | login or register to post comments

A lot of throw our monitors

A lot of throw our monitors into portrait mode, which is great for reading normal websites, but...we obviously have less pixels for deep discussions.

The problem is less technical and more sociological in deeply threaded discussions. Most discussion at a deep level is less topical and more arcane. There is no way to refactor discussions, so there isn't much we can do about that.

By Sean McDirmid at Wed, 2010-01-20 07:16 | login or register to post comments

Most discussion at a deep

Most discussion at a deep level is less topical and more arcane.

Agreed. I would have used even stronger language...

By Ehud Lamm at Wed, 2010-01-20 08:22 | login or register to post comments

Seeing who is being replied to.

As the indenting is purely whitespace with no lines to suggest structure it can be very hard to see who a reply is being made to. This is made much harder when there are intervening replies/threads so that the parent has scrolled off of the screen.

Would it be easy to add some text to the right of the post title in a slightly smaller fontsize with (in reply to xxx) or similar?

By Andrew Moss at Tue, 2013-02-05 15:40 | login or register to post comments

isFeatureEasy :: Feature -> Bool


isFeatureEasy = const False

By Matt M at Tue, 2013-02-05 16:10 | login or register to post comments