On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 10:12 AM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) < bjorsch@wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 8:27 PM, Danny Horn dhorn@wikimedia.org wrote:
So we've figured out a new reply/indentation model that separates those two functions. We've been testing it out on the flow-tests server [1], and we're going to release it to Mediawiki soon.
I ran some tests at http://flow-tests.wmflabs.org/wiki/Topic:Sdrqdcffddyz0jeo. Here are my observations:
- Posts B, C, and I all reply to A, but the ordering is C, I, B. I'd
expect replies to the same parent to be ordered chronologically (and I'd personally expect earliest first).
- Posts B and C both reply to A, but are confusingly at different
indentation levels. I'd expect replies to the same parent to be indented the same.
- Posts I and E are at the same indentation level, despite I being a
direct reply to A while E is at the end of the chain A→C→D→E. Similar confusion exists elsewhere. I'd expect two posts at the first indentation level under the same parent to both be replies to that parent.
- Things are even weirder with post J: Even though D and its reply E
are at the same indentation level, J is suddenly indented more because of an unrelated post I.
- Things go completely wrong once we hit the maximum depth, it's
impossible to have (or only to be seen as having?) "tangents" at all. The reply box doesn't even show up under the post where I actually clicked "Reply".
All in all, I personally find the resulting structure to be very confusing as to what's actually replying to what since the same reply-structure might be displayed in different ways (depending on the order the replies were entered) and different reply-structures can give rise to the same display-structure.
(sorry for the self-reply)
Some of these might be solved by simply abandoning the idea that "first reply = main thread, all others = tangent" in favor of displaying flat if this post and its parent both have no "sibling" post.
That /would/ mean, though, that a single reply could result in a major change to display-structure. For example, a reply-chain A→B→C→D→E→F→G would be displayed flat, and then when someone posts B2 as a reply to A we'd have A, then indented under it B and B2, then indented under B we'd have C→D→E→F→G (which might still be displayed flat).
And there'd still be the case that a chain of replies and a single post with multiple direct replies (none of which were replied to) could be displayed the same in some cases, but that seems less likely to be confusing to a reader.