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ata comments on Proposed New Features for Less Wrong - Less Wrong
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I have a suggestion: recent comments for threads.
Once the comments to a post get big and grow into many trees (which get split off onto other "continue this thread..." pages), it becomes very hard to follow and find new replies to those threads.
Manually scanning through all the branches in the tree is time-consuming, and it can be easy to miss one or two new posts. Sometimes I find myself using the recent comments page, but then I have to scan through comments in other discussions that I'm not so interested in. Another technique I've tried is watching the comments page of the prolific posters in the discussion I am following, but that also gets time-consuming, and will lead me to miss comments from other people in the discussion.
Does anyone else find this a problem? Any solutions within the current features of the site? If not, is there anything that can be done to make this easier to follow?
The best thing I can think of would be a "recent comments" page for each individual post. It would basically be another "Sort By" of the comments that would take them out of their tree structure, and put them in a flat view ordered by recentness.
Yes.
Not that I know of. My ideal solution would be to have the site keep track of post-readness; each post would have some little marker (a bullet or a star or something), something visible enough that you could quickly scan for it when scrolling through many posts, and clicking anywhere on a post would clear it.
This could be implemented on the client side through JavaScript and HTML5 local storage, and may not even need any assistance from the server if something like Greasemonkey is available. I'll write a script to do this if anyone's interested.
The big advantage to doing it on the server would be that you'd have the same information shared between multiple computers, and it would also be able to do other things with the information that couldn't be done in a purely client-side solution, such as generating a page that shows only new posts (whether for one article, one thread, or the whole site). The big disadvantage would be the amount of space that would be needed to store all that information, and the amount of time it would take to look up the needed information on every page view. Many forum systems do something similar with apparently acceptable efficiency, but they're mostly flat (non-threaded), so they only need to keep track of when each user has last viewed each topic. This would be quite different, since it would have to track that information for each post. Are there any public statistics on how many posts and active users exist on LW? If there are, I could do some rough calculations on the feasibility of this.