Hidden Replies and light coloring

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1

The look and feel of this so far is spectacular.

If the comment system is going to be threaded (only a single level deep?), I personally find it annoying that the replies are hidden by default. Scroll, click replies, scroll, click replies… I’d prefer to have all the comments shown as I scroll down.

Also, the coloring makes it hard to see. The very dim “2 replies” (until you mouse-over). The changed color on mouse-over is great but IMO it’s too dim, hard to see when it’s not highlighted.

Is the option to change these somewhere? Or planned? Or am I alone in these thoughts?

Chris

2

Thanks!

They are, you just have to scroll down to read them in proper sequence. :wink:

You can think of the reply expansion as a sneak preview function. Discourse is primarily a flat discussion system.

This is to enhance readability on mouse based devices. We suppress repeated elements so the page is less noisy; hover your pointer to see them.

You’ll notice when reading on iPad or Surface Pro or smartphone that there is no dimmed state because there’s no concept of hover on a touch device.

3

Ahh awesome. Not sure if I’ve seen something act like that before (replies being a sneak into what is shown below), but I think I like the thought of it.

Is this something new that hasn’t been tried before elsewhere? If so, might need some way to emphasize that. I would assume that, like me, people will see “Replies” and treat it like SO, /. or any other where that’s the only place the replies will be.

4

They are, you just have to scroll down to read them in proper sequence

I think having both makes the site look broken, with content duplicated around like that. I didn’t know it was intentional until finding your post here.

It’s also very annoying to expand replies, then scroll down and find things you’ve already read mixed in with things you haven’t.

I think it should be either/or… Or perhaps, when you expand, those replies are removed from the bottom?

5

Then how would you like or reply to them? You can’t do that with the expanded replies.

Maybe a better solution is some sort of visible read marker on them, like dim them downstream or something.

You really should think of reply and in-reply-to expansion as sneak previews and reminders. If you are using them as a primary form of navigation, you are swimming upstream. This is primarily a flat system, with some hybridization as training wheels.

6

Then it seems to me that you’re mixing things up backwards. What’s been built so far looks and acts like a forum*, not a commenting system, and those don’t have threaded replies - and so at the very least shouldn’t be referred to as in this quote.

*This “reply preview”, and using categories instead of subforums, are all I’ve seen so far that I haven’t already seen on other forums…

7

The training wheels doesn’t bother me, personally. Nor does the different system. I kinda like the idea of a hybrid system.

The only thing that I think is that people will see replies and think it’s solely threaded and not realize the comments are down below as well. That’s what I thought because that’s “normal”.

I just wonder what could be done to emphasize the dual nature. “This is the reply to this post, but don’t worry the reply is also down below in standard time entered format as well”

What exists to let people some random person that the setup here is slightly different than normal?

8

Yeah, it annoyed me as well. Here is what I used to make them appear not as faint:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("discuss.atom.io"), domain("meta.discourse.org"), domain("discourse.codinghorror.com") {
    .post-cloak section.post-menu-area, .post-cloak .post-actions {
        opacity: 0.4 !important;
    }
    
    
    .post-cloak:hover section.post-menu-area, .post-cloak:hover .post-actions {
        opacity: 1 !important;
    }
}

You need Stylish to use the style or find the appropriate way for the browser of your choice. You can also do this in FireFox without an Add-on but I don’t know what the file must be named like.

9

I think eventually we will get to that, but it will take a while. Another option is for those that enjoy clicking on every single “thread” in a topic to expand it, we could hide all other posts.

You can see the hiding in effect by clicking/tapping on my avatar here and then select “filter”. Also works on the usernames at the top in the topic summary, so you can keep clicking/tapping to add and remove other users to your view.