Quick Reply button...
Kevin Wood
Posts: 1,266
Is it possible to do away with having to click a button to "quick reply"?
What's really the point of having "reply" & "quick reply", when they both require clicking a button anyways?
Thanks.
What's really the point of having "reply" & "quick reply", when they both require clicking a button anyways?
Thanks.
Comments
Can someone enlighten me as to the sanity of that threaded mode of operation?
I know it's sometimes hard to follow who is replying to what in a thread and that this threaded mode is supposed to help with that.
BUT
1) Normally people include a quote or enough context in a post that you know which post or "sub thread" they are responding to. So this threaded mode is actually redundant.
2) How do I, as a reader of long and long lived thread deal with this scenario.
Let's say a thread has been going on for a year and has 500 posts, there are many such.
Every now and then I catch up with progress by working backwards from the end till I find something I have not seen yet and start reading forward to the end.
Someone posts a reply to a post in the middle from 6 months ago.
How on earth do I ever become aware of that?
Call me old fashioned but I think I thread should be, well a thread. A single stream of communal conciousness that's starts at A and ends at B. If any one wants to bifurcate that into a divergent sub thread then they should just start an new thread. How hard can it be, happens all the time.
Think processes, with threads underneath, instead of just a threaded model.
The OS analogy would be this forum being one process, with the threads (conversations) being entities under that. Each one linear, progressing as it does.
If that's ignored, and each conversation is a "process", then off topic discussion can occur, forming a branch, leaving the original topic unchanged. The overall complexity of the discussion can be much greater, advancing on several fronts at once, rather than one.
For a long time, I've been interested in these differences. The original daddy of threaded discussion is USENET. Powerful stuff, and my primary mode early on. When the linear forums showed up, I felt very constrained, and believed the discussions were far more limited.
Threaded discussion is best for things of higher complexity, like politics, or very large projects that operate over significant amounts of time, where the scope of discussion can range over considerable ground, sometimes taking a life of it's own, only to circle around and be relevant to a much earlier contribution.
Debate cannot reasonably happen on linear threads, for example, unless it's very structured, and between few, or two parties. Threaded, on the other hand, is capable of debate between groups, while not preventing consensus, due to lack of focus.
One cannot discuss the Linux Kernel, for example, in simple linear mode. The project scope is too high for linear to make any real sense over time.
The downside to threaded, and why it's not seen as much these days, is that using it it something to be learned. There is a small barrier, and some new habits, one being the user needing to keep more discussion states in their head over a long time, or spend more time parsing new contributions. Unavoidable.
Linear is simple. Either there is an addition, or not, and it's relevant, or not, done! That's why it's popular. I would compare that to UNIX vs Windows for example, with very similar high complexity potency implications, using OSes as an analogy again.
Sorry for the minor league dissertation on the two. How a forum is structured, what it's moderation rules are, and how it's presented all contribute to the behavior of the community they contain.
BTW: This particular form breaks many of the norms, usually in play for linear web discussion, with it's quality approaching what threads can do, and a noise level on par with some of the most draconian moderation their is. We are a very, very good group in a lot of ways, not appreciated until one has waded through the cesspool for a while. That's fascinating to me.
When it all settles down, give threaded a try. The only downside here is that the default will be linear, which basically cuts threaded off at the knees. Most people will be using linear mode, not progressing to threaded, for reasons you just gave. A contribution to a branch, will be seen as confusing, unless somebody picks up on titles. (not likely)
Elsewhere, I've seen people declare a particular new topic a threaded one, with mixed results. Maybe we can try it some day.
Re: New posts. What tends to happen is you will maintain a mental state of the various states of the branches of the thread, much like you do now with the various linear discussions. The "new posts" feature operates unchanged, alerting one to the new discussion.
What does change is the context of it. Instead of just reading back through the discussion, it has to be parsed at a low level, to understand whether or not the new contribution is in context, or noise, or a branch in the discussion. All other things are actually the same.
If this were a threaded discussion, my post would appear under yours, as a reply specifically to it, much like we would normally use a PM. Those, however, are not public, limiting the options we have. In a threaded sense, most readers would see that I chose to expand significantly on something you wrote, see that for what it is, and have the choice to move on, keeping focus on the primary topic.
In linear, it's just a big blob, and something that adds to the overall noise. That's generally the appeal of threads, as little "meanders" as Andrey would say, can expand into something productive, without having to initiate a new topic, and hope the mind-share comes along for the ride.
(sorry all. I'm kind of hoping some information about threaded vs linear is found useful, and it serves as a great example of how threaded can work over linear)
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?t=124747
View it, then switch between the three modes.
So... can you change it?
I use the single thread model, and I would be happy if there was some code somewhere that permanently enabled quick reply only if you defaulted to single thread. I jonw that you didn't create vbulletin, so I don't know if it exists.
What about those that choose to use threaded mode? This would seem to either need to be user selectable, or stay as is.
Jim;
Do you mean the thread vs. linear mode, or enable/disable the "quick reply button"?
I know you can set the options for thread display, but I think Kevin was suggesting turning the requirement to press one of the "quick reply buttons" off. (and this is what I was "taking exception to") I couldn't find an option for that (but that doesn't mean it's not there...).
The reason for the buttons is context. Where does the reply go? That has to be kludged, if the reply input fields are active, given the forum is threaded aware.
Probably the shortest path is to modify the page in linear mode, such that the "reply" context is simply the post with the last time-stamp, and watch for the case where somebody clicks on the quote buttons, and adjust the "reply-to" post accordingly, losing any text input along the way. Software updates will probably clobber that.
The "post quick reply" button URL could be written to include the post number according to the "last post" time stamp, allowing for the text field to be active as it is in threaded mode, where the post being viewed provides that context. Perhaps that's actually an option? Seems to me, that would come up often enough. Either the administrators or forum hosts deal with the "how come I gotta hit the button?" query, or the software authors deal with the "where did my text go?", or "why is my reply in the wrong place?" queries. There is not a make all the use cases happy scenario here.
That does leave the odd case where somebody keys in text, that will get lost, when they bonk on the quote button. Perhaps that's acceptable. That looks to me like the reason it is the way it is. By forcing the contributor to actually do something, they make the mode of operation very discoverable, meaning fewer overall user issues. Smart, but somewhat annoying, given the old forum behavior many of us are used to.
I personally would prefer the forum remain thread aware, as it's the far more powerful and robust discussion mode. Of course, I'm always a higher end feature kind of guy. Better to have it and deal, than work around and kludge. That seems to never, ever scale, though it often seems a good idea at the time.
The customizations would be a concern for me. At some point the upgrade will be necessary. IMHO, many software updates can probably be ignored, given the forum is robust now. Of course, software updates deal with all the browser render cases. If something new is released, and it's broken here, that can get ugly, in that it's either kludging on top of a kludge, or redoing the kludge after each pass, testing behavior after the update is run.
The least work is to configure, not customize, IMHO. No matter what they say, the upgrade, when or if that time comes, will have it's own issues, made worse by the use of custom options. Configuration is the best case here, leaving mostly the skinning to be migrated to the new software, at that time of either update or upgrade.
I'm may be tasked with setting up a forum soon. This all has been very interesting to watch. I'm gaining some appreciation for what is involved at stage two. Stage one is to put it out there, hope it grows, etc... Stage two is rolling that forward like we are seeing right now. Thanks Parallax and Jim. Seriously.
**I am perfectly happy to live with any of that too. Just sharing thoughts and impressions, that's all.***
FWIW, I also discovered this about quick reply...
1. activate the box
2. get halfway through some detailed answer
3. accidentally click something that browses you away to some different page
4. browse back a page to the thread you are quick replying to
5. stare at your unfinished reply locked away in a grayed out quick reply box, unable to be edited
6. click a "quick reply button", thinking it will let you finish editing your reply, only to see your text vanish into the ether
7. decide to let somebody else answer the question...
I have tried the threaded views and I may be a bit old fashioned but I am with Kevin in that I like the linear mode.
Thing is I don't particularly agree. I do understand where you are going with your explanation. I'm quite happy with "bifurcations" in processes/threads, in directory hierarchies, in source code repositories and many other places. I just don't think I want my forum threads bifurcated. Why?
1) Well, they already are. There is a tree structure in place already com->parallax->forums->propeller_forum->thread->post. I think that's quite granular enough already.
2) If anyone starts getting a bit off topic in a thread with a great new idea they can always "bifurcate" at that point by starting a whole new thread. I have seen this happen many times.
Now, you did not answer my question. If someone makes a reply to a one year old post in the middle of a long thread, then there it is somewhere in the middle. Not at the current head of the thread.
Given my habit to check the last recent posts on all threads that pop up to catch up on progress. How am I ever going to become aware of that new post sitting there in the middle somewhere.
We could try an experiment, you could make a threaded comment on a 6 months old post in my ZiCog thread. I could see what happens:)
Odds are, you will see the post, unless the entire forum is skipped. Then there is always PM as a reminder option in any mode.
I don't think we have to agree, but it is fun to talk about. There are trade-offs for these things. One thing about linear is that the mental state for the consumer of the forum doesn't need to be very complex, and is low maintenance.
The trade off is the inability to manage larger scope discussions and or higher complexity ones. (not sure they are needed, just to be fair)
In threaded, the mental state requirements are higher, but then again, so is the potential for the discussion.
A whole lot of this depends on the modes that people have used most often. If one came up threaded, then linear is seen as simple, (fun to me), and somewhat limited.
Another example I would give is e-mail. Forever, Outlook was just dumb. It wouldn't thread anything, limiting the overall utility of e-mail in ways still seen today. On the other hand, those that didn't use that thing, ended up frustrated by it, for lack of reasonable threading capabilities.
I used USENET, and some early UNIX mail clients, and ran a nice, threaded news / mail reader under Netscape / Mozilla for a long time. Hated Outlook totally for that omission, which they've since changed, making it a somewhat respectable mail client these days.
It has been interesting to watch linear mode users attempt to come to grips with both Gmail, and some of our PLM software, both of which feature higher level interfaces to these things. Lots of interesting pros and cons.
In the model you gave Heater, the one function lacking is group context. Of course we have sub-forums that are not yet used I believe, and major forum categories, like for the wireless that get there in a very coarse way.
Those are fine, if a bit constrained. Perfectly serviceable to me personally.
Now that I've posted that up, the disadvantage to linear is this blob is here. Perfectly reasonable and entertaining conversation. It's even productive in some ways. We know something about each other, and there is some info here that is relevant, but not that relevant.
Would be ideal to just have it out there, where those that follow down the path can choose to continue, those that don't, simply reply to the main context, strengthening it, instead of having to skip over every time an update to the thread is made.
Again... trade-offs, that's all.