Story 2014-05-13 3KF Read It

Read It

by
in pipedot on (#3KF)
Ever revisit a popular story page and wish you could easily distinguish the new comments from the stuff you've already read? Well, now you can!

New comments are now shown in blue, while old comments are shown in gray. Simple enough, right?
Reply 24 comments

Nice! (Score: 3, Insightful)

by computermachine@pipedot.org on 2014-05-13 10:54 (#1J0)

This is a very useful feature.

Re: Nice! (Score: 3, Funny)

by nightsky30@pipedot.org on 2014-05-13 11:27 (#1J1)

I for one welcome our new bicolored comment overlords.

Re: Nice! (Score: 3, Funny)

by billshooterofbul@pipedot.org on 2014-05-13 13:34 (#1J6)

Id like to remind them that as a trusted poster, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their two tone comment caves.

Re: Nice! (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-05-13 16:34 (#1JD)

Agreed - this is very useful and is a huge improvement in useability. Im not aware of any other site on earth that does this. Does anyone know of another site offering this functionality? Has it ever been seen in the wild?

Re: Nice! (Score: 3, Insightful)

by fatphil@pipedot.org on 2014-05-13 17:33 (#1JH)

It's totally freaking awesome!

Of course, it's been seen before in the environment called "Usenet" (and also "email"), but on something that's a web-forum, it indeed does seem to be new.

Which reminds me - I look forward to the NNTP interface ;-)

Re: Nice! (Score: 2, Interesting)

by fatphil@pipedot.org on 2014-05-13 17:38 (#1JJ)

However, there's a bug :-(

If you reply to a post at the top of the thread, before reading the whole thread, then when you return to the thread after clicking "post", all those things you've not read are greyed out.

I presume this is just timestamp-based? If so, perhaps don't commit the "thread last rendered" timestamp until some affirmative thread-leaving action is performed. Posting a reply would not be classified as a thread-leaving action. This might require some significantly trickier smarts to implement than just the naive situation we have at the moment.

Simpler Workaround: middle-click the "reply" link to get it in a new tab, and then just close after posting.

Re: Nice! (Score: 2, Informative)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-05-18 03:12 (#1PS)

Posting a reply would not be classified as a thread-leaving action.
Implemented. Posting a reply will now prevent the colors from changing on the rest of the comments.

Re: Nice! (Score: 1)

by fatphil@pipedot.org on 2014-05-18 18:28 (#1Q6)

There seems to be a bug which appears related to such a change:

Notice: Undefined index: last_time in /var/pipedot/lib/tools/tools.php on line 768 error: sql [insert into story_history (sid, zid, time, last_time) values (?, ?, ?, ?)] arg [183, fatphil@pipedot.org, 1400437667, ] msg [SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violation: 1048 Column 'last_time' cannot be null]

Re: Nice! (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-05-13 18:26 (#1JN)

Which reminds me - I look forward to the NNTP interface ;-)
Oh man, that would be like tech nirvana for me. Id probably never turn off the computer again if that happened, and slowly lose all contact with the outside world ... I spend a lot of time on comp.misc and really love Usenet in ways the WWW has never really re-implemented (for better or for worse).

Re: Nice! (Score: 2, Interesting)

by tdk@pipedot.org on 2014-05-13 17:54 (#1JK)

Does anyone know of another site offering this functionality?
squte.com (my site) does this with a 'new' word in bold next to the comment, I used to show the whole comment title in bold, but found it distracting.

This is a standard option in Drupal, so I expect a few sites do it.

There are other possible similar features, e.g. have comments by the author of the story shown differently, comments by the user viewing the page, anonymous comments, etc, but most of them become more distracting than they are worth.

ISTM Pipedot now has more features than soylentnews despite having a fifth of the developers

Re: Nice! (Score: 3, Informative)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-05-13 18:28 (#1JP)

Pipedot now has more features than soylentnews despite having a fifth of the developers
Also, in < two months, Pipedot now has an interface that a recent scientific study concluded is 500,000% better and more useable than Slashdot Beta (F it! Buck Feta!)

Re: Nice! (Score: 3, Informative)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-05-13 19:37 (#1JT)

Just tested and as suspected, the colors follow you as you access from computer to computer. That tops Usenet, and is highly useful. Wowzer.

Re: Nice! (Score: 1)

by tdk@pipedot.org on 2014-05-14 09:13 (#1JZ)

This is a common issue people have with Usenet - each reader keeps its own list of read messages. The usual suggestions are to either ssh to a command line newsreader (eg slrn), or use a web based one. Another possibility is to use a Usenet to mail interface and an IMAP mail server.

Re: Nice! (Score: 4, Informative)

by ncommander@pipedot.org on 2014-05-16 01:35 (#1N3)

The primary reason for this is that we (SN) don't use a rolling release system, preferring to do bi-monthly releases. The feature gap between the two sites will be considerably less when we do our rollout in June.

Awesome (Score: 3, Funny)

by dotdotdot@pipedot.org on 2014-05-13 14:00 (#1J8)

Much idea. Really sense. A lot help.

another nice feature (Score: 2, Interesting)

by tdk@pipedot.org on 2014-05-14 09:00 (#1JY)

another nice feature would be to show the number of new comments in the summary i.e
n comments (m new)

Doesn't work? (Score: 1)

by kritonk@pipedot.org on 2014-05-14 09:35 (#1K1)

I visited the discussion for this article yesterday, when there were only a couple of comments posted. I revisited it today; they were more comments, but they were all in black letters. Am I missing something?

Re: Doesn't work? (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-14 10:14 (#1K7)

It's not the text color that changes, it's the title bar for each comment.

Re: Doesn't work? (Score: 1)

by kritonk@pipedot.org on 2014-05-14 10:37 (#1KA)

Indeed! I wonder how I failed to notice it.

Re: Doesn't work? (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-14 14:11 (#1KH)

Is the function available to anonymous cowards?

Re: Doesn't work? (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-16 04:20 (#1N5)

Doesn't seem like it.