February 16, 2002

4:22 PM

Is there some easy/efficient way to check for replies to your posts (e.g. your nick mentioned in a new post), so that you don't have to look at each individual thread you've posted to, checking for respsonses? (more inside)
posted by bingo to feature requests at 4:22 PM (25 comments total)

I know you can check the "new comments" number, but if you're going back and forth between pages, the comments registered as "new" may change to old comments before you get to look at them. And then you have to remember how many comments there had been, etc. Or am I confused about the way that works?

This is on "feature requests" because I think it would be cool if such a search capability was part of the site. But it also occurs to me that probably some of you more programming-minded souls have already created solutions to this on your own...anyone?
posted by bingo at 4:24 PM on February 16, 2002

Your request doesn't seem clear to me, I don't know exactly what you're asking for. The new comments indicators should "stick" for 20 minutes, and unless you read a thread for that long, it shouldn't go away on you.

There is a "my comments" feature sort on the home page, did you want something other than that?
posted by mathowie at 4:48 PM on February 16, 2002

I guess what I was thinking was something along the lines of "threads that I have commented on, that also have a new comment."
posted by bingo at 4:55 PM on February 16, 2002

Yes, does this feature exist? It might encourage people to post some followup materials on older threads. Seems like there aren't many conmments on posts more than a few days old. If it were easier to pick out new remarks on your threads of interest, people might be willing to conduct a discussion over a period of days, not hours, and feel a little less compelled to put in their two cents as fast as possible before all the readers go away.
(For some reason, I don't usually get the "My Comments" feature on the front page pulldown. Is it because I'm using an older version of Netscape?)
posted by sheauga at 6:33 PM on February 16, 2002

Yes, does this feature exist? It might encourage people to post some followup materials on older threads. Seems like there aren't many conmments on posts more than a few days old. If it were easier to pick out new remarks on your threads of interest, people might be willing to conduct a discussion over a period of days, not hours, and feel a little less compelled to put in their two cents as fast as possible before all the readers go away.
(For some reason, I don't usually get the "My Comments" feature on the front page pulldown. Is it because I'm using an older version of Netscape?)
posted by sheauga at 6:33 PM on February 16, 2002

I don't get the "my comments" feature either. Is Matt referring to the page you get when you click on your own name? I use IE.
posted by bingo at 7:51 PM on February 16, 2002

"my comments" is one of the options you can select in the little grey "sort by" field, such as "date".
If you don't see it, select another option, then when you pull down the little menu again, you'll see it as an option.
posted by dong_resin at 8:18 PM on February 16, 2002

ah yes, it's all coming clear to me now.
posted by bingo at 9:07 PM on February 16, 2002

Time to get Skippy right on that.

Pardon me whilst I run quickly now.

posted by ebarker at 9:22 PM on February 16, 2002

Okay, I've been giving this some thought. Maybe this is what I'm really talking about.

The "new comments" numbers dont' do me much good, because (if I understand it right) they refer to comments that have been made in the last 20 minutes. Even if I have already read those comments, they still show up as new. And if I haven't read them, but they were posted more than x amount of time ago, they don't show up as new anymore. Am I right? What I would like is some display of how many comments that I have not read, have been posted since my last contribution to the thread. Does that make sense?
posted by bingo at 10:38 AM on February 17, 2002

The "new comments" numbers dont' do me much good, because (if I understand it right) they refer to comments that have been made in the last 20 minutes.

Nope, they refer to the number of comments made since your last visit. The "20 minutes" thing refers to how long those new comments should "stick." You mentioned you lose track of new comments and I thought that maybe your counts went to zero.

I still don't understand how or where to properly display "number of new comments made on posts I commented on earlier"
posted by mathowie at 11:51 AM on February 17, 2002

I think what he's asking for is a way to find out if anybody has commented on a particular post without going into the thread itself.

If this was in the thread, for example:

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, etc.
posted by bingo at time/date

bingo-what you said there is so completely true/false/incredible/etc, etc, etc.
posted by joeblow at time/date

bingo would like some way of knowing that somebody was talking directly to him or about him (without going into the thread itself).

Bingo, is that what you mean?
posted by ashbury at 1:28 PM on February 17, 2002

ashbury: yes, that would be ideal, although i think it would also be nice to just get a list of the threads that i've posted to, which also contain comments that have been posted since the last time I looked at the thread.
posted by bingo at 2:31 PM on February 17, 2002

i think it would also be nice to just get a list of the threads that i've posted to,

already in the my comments drop down...

which also contain comments that have been posted since the last time I looked at the thread.

I can't think of how or where to add this in the interface, so I can't give even a maybe to this request. Would you want the welcome stuff in the upper right to be as follows?

"13559 members | You are logged in as: mathowie / logout
There have been 2 links and 16 comments posted since your last visit
There have been 4 comments posted to your commented threads"
posted by mathowie at 2:54 PM on February 17, 2002

Matt, wouldn't that further slow down the loading of the site during peak hours?

Perhaps it would make more sense to show that number only on the page showing "my comments"
posted by riffola at 3:40 PM on February 17, 2002

Personally I think the new comment indicators on the "my comments" page besides the posts are enough.

Also "my comments" option is still missing from the default page index. You have to pick another sorting order before switching to "my comments"
posted by riffola at 3:43 PM on February 17, 2002

"my comments" should show up for everyone now, though it's an intense query, so use sparingly.
posted by mathowie at 4:26 PM on February 17, 2002

mathowie:Nope, they refer to the number of comments made since your last visit. The "20 minutes" thing refers to how long those new comments should "stick."

Does every time I load the home page count as a visit in this case? Does the "sticking" mean that the same comments are still going to be listed as new when I re-load the home page, or the "my comments" page, a few minutes later?

I guess I wish MeFi defined "new" in the same way email programs do...that is, if you haven't read it, it stays "new" indefinitely until you do. And, once you read a thread, all the comments on that thread no longer count as "new." In other words, I guess I would like to know the number of unread (by me) comments in each thread...or somehow, for the number of new comments to have less to do with how long ago I last loaded the front page, taking into account the 20 minute stick period and remembering both how many comments were in each thread the last time I read them, and how many times I've re-loaded the site since making my last comment in a particular thread...and more to do with what has been posted that I definitely have not had a chance to read yet.

posted by bingo at 4:46 PM on February 17, 2002

Does every time I load the home page count as a visit in this case? Does the "sticking" mean that the same comments are still going to be listed as new when I re-load the home page,

Everything stays new as long as you're on the site, and loading pages within 20 minutes of each other (example: you load the index page, read it for a minute, go into a comment, read it for five minutes, come back out to the index page and the new indicators are the same as when you first got there).

I guess I wish MeFi defined "new" in the same way email programs do...that is, if you haven't read it, it stays "new" indefinitely until you do.

In programming, this is called "vectoring." I would have to create a separate database, with a record of every thread that every single user has seen, and constantly back check against it when displaying a page. Every page you look at would require writing to the database (to indicate you read it). To put it lightly, it's is horrendous on server resources. I've only heard of a few instances where people successfully implemented such a feature on a site with more than a handful of people. It's just too resource intensive to keep track of 13,000 people reading 14,000 threads.
posted by mathowie at 5:34 PM on February 17, 2002

What if the number of new messages got a visisted link color that matched the background? In that way, clicking on the link would cause it to disapear until the display was refreshed with a new number.
posted by willnot at 7:15 PM on February 17, 2002

but the URL would stay the same, so the links would disappear for good, wouldn't they?
posted by mathowie at 5:37 PM on February 18, 2002

You understand how the page is put together a lot better than I do, but the URL for the X New points at an anchor tag doesn't it?

At some point when the number refreshes itself, doesn't it get a new anchor to point at? When it gets a new anchor to point at the browser should see it as a new URL and display it unvisited again.

At least that's what happens in Mac IE 5.1. Other browsers may handle that differently.

The real problem is I think bingo would like the number of new messages to be incremental. So if there are 5 new messages, and I don't click into the link, if I come back a day later and 3 additional messages have been added, the number of new messages would read 8 - not 3.

The only way I can think of to do that short of writing it to the database would be to right the number of messages for a thread into a cookie whenever you click in to read it. Then have the client calculate the difference between the total messages the thread currently has and the number the cookie says it had in javascript.

Probably more trouble than it's worth, but it should be possible.
posted by willnot at 6:01 PM on February 18, 2002

Of course both of those tricks would break if you access the site from different computers.
posted by willnot at 6:03 PM on February 18, 2002

bingo, if you want to check on particular threads to see if they have any new comments after they've been archived, you could perhaps use Spyonit.
posted by kv at 6:20 PM on February 18, 2002

oh, I think on IE6/pc, and IE5.12/osX I find that targets aren't interpretted as new links. the page being linked is shown as old, no matter what the target points at, but I could double check that.
posted by mathowie at 7:23 PM on February 18, 2002