How about a setting to auto-collapse anything not new?
Edit - please disregard this post
"New" is ill-defined. One of the glories of trn is that each registered person has a file which keeps track of which posts and comments they've seen.
On usenet, this was possible because each post was shown one at a time in ascii, which was fast enough to work even over a 56K connection.
I don't think there was any way to make such a system to work on the web without JavaScript.
A scheme like yours could work with user-specified dates for collapsing everything prior and/or with collapsing prior to when the person signed out for those who don't just...
In the next month, the administrators of Less Wrong are going to sit down with a professional designer to tweak the site design. But before they do, now is your chance to make suggestions that will guide their redesign efforts.
How can we improve the Less Wrong user experience? What features aren’t working? What features don’t exist? What would you change about the layout, templates, images, navigation, comment nesting, post/comment editing, side-bars, RSS feeds, color schemes, etc? Do you have specific CSS or HTML changes you'd make to improve load time, SEO, or other valuable metrics?
The rules for this thread are:
BUT DON’T JUMP TO THE COMMENTS JUST YET: Take a few minutes to collect your thoughts and write down your own ideas before reading others’ suggestions. Less contamination = more unique ideas + better feature coverage!
Thanks for your help!