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(a)wikimedia.org
wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 10:12 AM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) <
> bjorsch(a)wikimedia.org
wrote:
>
> > On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 8:27 PM, Danny Horn <dhorn(a)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.
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