Recent discussion about discussions

Thomas Mader thomas.mader at gmail.com
Sat Mar 15 05:11:48 PDT 2014


On Friday, 14 March 2014 at 09:38:59 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> On 3/14/14, 2:12 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>> On Friday, 14 March 2014 at 09:03:02 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
>> wrote:
>>> As of this very moment, my NNTP client (Thunderbird) shows 
>>> there are 5
>>> messages unread in the left treeview 
>>> (http://imgur.com/KHnjcnU), and
>>> displays in a simple list all 223871 messages ever posted in
>>> digitalmars.D with the most recent 5 messages at the top and 
>>> in bold
>>> text (http://imgur.com/uJ2UdzA). As I select each of those 
>>> unread
>>> messages, their bold disappears (they become read). If I get 
>>> bored and
>>> want to mark all news as read, there's a button that does 
>>> that (or I
>>> could select some and mark as read etc).
>>>
>>> I use threaded views for e.g. github discussions because once 
>>> a pull
>>> is merged, I archive them all in one shot. But a flat view is 
>>> a very
>>> simple and effective way of staying abreast of what's going 
>>> on in the
>>> forum. Again, I feel I'm missing something given that I'm the 
>>> only one
>>> asking for such.
>>
>> In the horizontal-split mode, you can press the space bar to 
>> jump to the
>> next unread message. Does that help? Or is it imperative that 
>> messages
>> are displayed chronologically, without threading?
>
> Nothing is really imperative; I'm not asking for features here 
> as much as pointing out what my patterns are. The horizontal 
> split view is pretty nice, I'll use it whenever I don't have my 
> mail client with me. I could probably get used to it but I 
> prefer a flat view.

I use the Webforum in basic mode and it fits my needs as a silent 
reader very well, but there is one disturbing thing.
Every time a context (subtree) switch takes place in a discussion 
in the same thread, one needs to read text which was already read 
just to get the right context.
This is in my opinion very time consuming and exhausting even if 
you just need to read a few words of the parent post. It's also 
very much dependent on the authors choice of quoting text.

So I have thought a bit about an improvement.
Wouldn't it be nice if there is a mixed mode view which is quite 
similar to the horizontal-split view but adds the time sorted 
linear basic thread list view above the thread tree view on the 
left side.
If no thread is selected in the basic view, the tree view will be 
empty because it displays just the selected thread from the basic 
view.
If one clicks on the 'N new' link in the basic view, the first 
(in time) unread message will be selected in the tree view (now 
displaying the entire conversation thread tree) and on the right 
side of the split the message is displayed.
The switch to the other unread messages in the thread works in a 
context first manner instead of a time based one. This way one 
has much fewer context switches which boosts up reading 
performance and it's less stressful for the mind. (Let's call it 
Zen-View because of this :-))
If one subtree of unread messages is finished the next unread 
subtree is selected by time again.

One has also the possibility to skip entire threads via the basic 
view. With a nice user interface and additional keyboard 
shortcuts this could probably be a nice addition/change to the 
existing workflows.

The problem that one post might include answers to different 
contexts exists, but IIRC this is quite uncommon and shouldn't be 
done anyway. Maybe this new view leads to even nicer quoting 
hierarchies.

Thomas


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