Brad: unfortunately, it's really hard to tell very much from a conversation with messages like "3: Post C: reply to Post A". You could do that with the old model, the new model or the perfect magic Nobel-Prize-winning discussion threading still to be discovered, and it would probably look like nonsense in all three.
We've tried in our testing to pretend that we're having real conversations, so we could see whether there's any logical way to get to eight levels of nested threading. It's not easy to organize make-believe conversations, but if you want to start a thread, I'd be happy to fire up a few sockpuppets and pretend to talk about something with you.
On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 7:35 AM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) <bjorsch@wikimedia.org
wrote:
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. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l