Subject:
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Re: Lugnet interface suggestion
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.general
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Date:
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Fri, 30 Apr 1999 16:46:32 GMT
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Viewed:
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400 times
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In lugnet.admin.general, blisses@worldnet.att.net (Steve Bliss) writes:
> Todd:
>
> This one's pretty minor, use it as you will...
>
> I was browsing through some of the prototype interface pages, and a thought
> occurred to me:
>
> In the message links list, would it be (reasonably) possible to list *only*
> links to root messages (instead of follow-ups), but build the list based on
> the timestamp of the most recent message in each thread?
Kind of like Slashdot does? I agree that has a lot of appeal. I gave this
a lot of thought a couple weeks ago, in fact -- and coded it up and tried it
that way for a few days -- but it didn't work out (the code worked; the
design didn't). It works* for Slashdot, but here are some of the problems
with it in a large, international ng environment:
1. The root of a thread isn't always well defined. That is, the root of a
thread can be any of:
a. a message with no References header, or
[easy to machine-detect]
b. a message with References headers but with no 'Re:' prefix, or
[easy to machine-detect]
c. a message completely changing the topic in the middle of a thread
and possibly also migrating to a new newsgroup
[extremely difficult to machine-detect]
Additional problems:
- there are messages that fit (a) that in fact -aren't- the roots of
threads (due to some obscure bad mailers/newsreaders which drop
references), and
- there are messages that fit (b) but sometimes 'Re:' is written in a
language other than English and shows up as, say, 'Zu:' or something,
and
- assuming that (c) can't be done automatically by machine, the root of
a thread which has migrated from group X to group Y would only show
up on group X's page and not on group Y's page.
2. If only the root node of a thread is linked to from the ng's homepage,
then each time you want to visit it to read the latest message (even if
the link changes color to let you know that there is a new message),
you have to load progressively longer pages and then find the new
message among the others. New messages -could- be given at the top in
reverse-chronological order, but this is fundamentally no different from
clicking on the single-article and then clicking around in the thread
from there.
3. Full-thread displays mess up link coloring in a really bad way. You can
actually have read all the articles in a thread but have only one or
two or half of them marked as a "visited link." Using #-subtags is no
help either (and they're evil in the same way, anyway). :-(
4. If the threads migrate downward on the page the way Slashdot does them,
then really popular threads get lost quickly if you don't bookmark them.
5. If the threads jump back up to the top of the list whenever a new node
appears in the thread, then the really popular threads drown out the
less popular threads. (This is especially important since the intro-
home-pages for the ngs will be displaying everything in that ng and
all the way down the hierarchy in a single integrated list -- great for
.loc.us, .loc.uk, the root homepage, etc.)
So the latest plan to handle all of this yet still improve on the existing
method is to show a quick-intro list of articles in reverse chronological
order, with the first 250 characters of the message bodies, and with links
to the indivudal articles if you want to read the whole thing. And from
there you'll be able to navigate the thread node-by-node using the tree
display that's already there, or pull up the entire thread on a single page.
The standard 20-per-page listing will still be there too, but it'll be link
off the group's homepage rather than coming up by default. The ng homepages
aren't 100% for news-articles -- on the ng homepages, the news articles need
to "squoosh aside" and make room for other equally important organizational
things such as links and notes. More on that in a future post.
--Todd
* Except when you want to check back on really long threads -- but they
probably have a way around that through some sort of expert-user feature.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Lugnet interface suggestion
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| Todd: This one's pretty minor, use it as you will... I was browsing through some of the prototype interface pages, and a thought occurred to me: In the message links list, would it be (reasonably) possible to list *only* links to root messages (...) (26 years ago, 30-Apr-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
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