Why can't I jump directly to a comment in a thread from the "activity" page?

January 19, 2012 9:11 AM

Why can't I jump directly to a comment in a thread from the "activity" page?

I often look at the "activity" page for myself (click your name in the upper right corner of the page, and then anything under "contributions" to see your own) to review the comments I've made in the recent past and jump back into the conversation where I left off.

This is easy for a "long" comment. You can read a truncated version of your comment and at the end there is a link that says "more", which you can click and be taken directly to your comment in the thread.

However, if your comment is "short", which means "short enough not to require truncation" then there is no "more" link. As far I can tell, you can only jump back to the beginning of a thread for these comments. If the thread is long, then scrolling back to your original comment is a pain, especially if you've been active in the thread with several posts and can't just do a "find" for your own username and get right there.

Is this intentional? Accidental? A bug? Am I the only person in the world who ever noticed this as an oversight?

posted by tylerkaraszewski to Feature Requests at 9:11 AM (33 comments total)

There's no "more" link, but you can click on the timestamp (e.g. "3:17 pm") in the byline in either case to go to the comment.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:13 AM on January 19, 2012

There are timestamps under each comment - clicking that will bring you to the precise comment in the thread.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:13 AM on January 19, 2012

so close.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:13 AM on January 19, 2012

I also think the reason this isn't a problem for others because most people who are trying to achieve the same goal use "Recent Activity" where there's a link where you can start from your most recent comment.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 9:14 AM on January 19, 2012

(Though I guess your version of "Activity" could be different -- I'm not as familiar with it -- so apologies if that doesn't help.)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 9:16 AM on January 19, 2012

Ah, timestamps, like Facebook and Twitter. I guess somehow this became standard, but I hate it. There is absolutely no mental connection for me that makes the timestamp a reasonable place to look for a link to an item. It's like trying to find directions to building by looking up the date it was built.

Thanks though.
posted by tylerkaraszewski at 9:28 AM on January 19, 2012

timestamps, like Facebook and Twitter. I guess somehow this became standard, but I hate it.

I don't mean to be all "get off my lawn" about this, but as soon as there were blogs with comments, pretty much, there were timestamps. The timestamp is the everywhere-on-the-site permalink to individual comments. There is an additional "more" option for Recent Activity. I don't think it's an oversight at all, just clearly a difference in how we're conceptualizing the way the site works [it's a blog, with comments, comments have timestamps, like they do on blogs] and what your expectations may be.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 9:30 AM on January 19, 2012

Careful, there is some serious permalink knowledge around these parts.
posted by no regrets, coyote at 9:35 AM on January 19, 2012 [4 favorites]

While we've got the thread open, is there a difference between what someone sees in their Recent Activity and what they see clicking on "View All Activity" in their profile (other than it aggregating posts and comments together)?
posted by MCMikeNamara at 9:40 AM on January 19, 2012

Those two have very different content, yeah.

Recent Activity (as in via the link in the header of the page) lists the last 20 threads you've commented in, with the last up-to-ten comments for each thread including your own last comment if it was in the last ten.

View All Activity (from your profile page) lists only your comments (or posts, or favorited items, depending on which tab you click), without any other thread context besides the title of the thread for the comments view.

So RA is really useful for following developing threads that you've commented in; View All Activity is not as handy for that but is a good way to go looking for a specific comment you made recently if you can't remember where it was.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:44 AM on January 19, 2012

I regularly trim my Recent Activity so I only see the threads I'm still interested in participating in, but other than that, I'm pretty sure they offer the same levels of aggregation.
posted by Phire at 9:44 AM on January 19, 2012

Or not.
posted by Phire at 9:44 AM on January 19, 2012

'Recent Activity' is much better, since it has other people's comments as well. I got here by clicking on the timestamp in my RA.

I wish there were a way to peg a thread I'm following (but not commenting in) to my Recent Activity page.

/I know, I know, use greasemonkey.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:47 AM on January 19, 2012 [2 favorites]

Basically, I think of Recent Activity as a way to keep track of what's going on in threads you've participated in, and the profile page activity stuff as a way to track down your own contributions. There can be some functional overlap there but they have different strengths and I pretty much live out of Recent Activity whereas I visit my profile activity only to look specific things up now and then.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:48 AM on January 19, 2012

I wish there were a way to peg a thread I'm following (but not commenting in) to my Recent Activity page.

It's not a perfect solution, but you can favorite a thread you want to follow and it'll show up in analgous fashion on the "My Favorites" tab on the Recent Activity page.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:49 AM on January 19, 2012

To clarify, I am not anti-timestamp. I like the timestamps. They are useful to know when things were done and what timeframe they're relevant to. I just think they are a particularly unintuitive bit of text to use as the canonical permalink to a piece of information. How do I get a link directly to this essay I wrote about growing avocados? "Click 10:13PM", is so far off of what I would guess that I don't even think to try it. I know I am not the only person who feels this way, as others have written articles about it.
posted by tylerkaraszewski at 9:50 AM on January 19, 2012

Yes, the "timestamp as permalink" thing is a horrible bit of UI cruft and sticks out like a sore thumb in every user study I've ever run with it in an interface, but sadly it's cruft we've been living with for at least ten years. It seems to have stuck.
posted by introp at 9:53 AM on January 19, 2012

Facebook's aggressively unhelpful styling of their permalinks is kind of its own issue, though. Mouseover a mefi timestamp—a highlighted entity in an explicit byline—and you get the unmunged url of the comment in question.

At a certain point having something other than "this is the permalink!" as the text for a permalink risks some sort of confusion from folks who just genuinely have not encountered the otherwise long-standing tradition of time/datestamps-as-permalinks, sure. And in an alternate universe where it wasn't tradition, maybe something else would be the prevailing approach.

But this is the universe we're in, and this is a site where literally all people do is exchange text communication in discrete chunks over time; the time at which something happened is as good a metaphorical anchor to a unique comment as any, as far as that goes.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:58 AM on January 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

I don't know...like most bits of UI we deal with daily, it may not be intuitive initially, but once you get used to it, it becomes second-nature. And once that happens, you find it to be much cleaner to reuse that bit of info for the permalink instead of adding even more UI cruft, which is the alternative.
posted by mysterpigg at 9:59 AM on January 19, 2012

Ah ha. Thanks. I knew some of that but not all and definitely not in which threads you favorited but didn't comment appeared . If you'd asked me, I would have thought that was also in Recent Activity, so I'm glad I asked. (I thought you could use favorites to keep track of conversations you wanted to follow in RA -- but apparently I've never shut up and not commented in threads I want to follow to discover that.)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:01 AM on January 19, 2012

What I don't get is how come kids are still being taught their ABCs instead of their QWEs.
posted by flabdablet at 4:47 PM on January 19, 2012

There is absolutely no mental connection for me that makes the timestamp a reasonable place to look for a link to an item.

You mean, aside from the fact that time timestamp is in MetaFilter-standard yellow link type while everything else in the text is white? That wasn't enough of a clue for you to realize it was a link, and thus must do something useful?
posted by hippybear at 5:28 PM on January 19, 2012

It makes sense to me that this isn't intuitive; I had the same mental block when I was first trying to figure that out. However, the trouble with the thing is that there really is no better place to put the link. It would be really crufty to make the whole comment a link; for obvious reasons we can't use a link on the username to link the comment. The only other possibility is to add a button or extraneous link after each and every comment, like maybe the word "comment" with a link on it; frustratingly, this turns out to be even more counterintuitive, I think, and moreover it's ugly. So linking on the time stamp makes the most sense.
posted by koeselitz at 7:19 PM on January 19, 2012

no regrets, coyote: "Careful, there is some serious permalink knowledge around these parts."

Thanks for linking to that! I enjoyed reading the interview with pb.
posted by ocherdraco at 7:32 PM on January 19, 2012

I wish there were a way to peg a thread I'm following (but not commenting in) to my Recent Activity page.

I'd love this too. I think the quidnunc kid has promised to provide this when he takes over.
posted by benito.strauss at 7:33 PM on January 19, 2012

I don't mean to be all "get off my lawn" about this

Oooh, oooh can I do it? I haven't had a good lawn-clearing shitfit for what seems like months!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:07 PM on January 19, 2012

Thanks for linking to that! I enjoyed reading the interview with pb.

I'm sure it was linked to in a MeTa post a year or so ago, but I can't find it now.
posted by no regrets, coyote at 8:37 PM on January 19, 2012

You mean, aside from the fact that time timestamp is in MetaFilter-standard yellow link type while everything else in the text is white? That wasn't enough of a clue for you to realize it was a link, and thus must do something useful?

That seems unnecessarily rude hippybear. I've known about the timestamp-linkage for years, but I still find myself occasionally staring blankly at the screen for 20 or 30 seconds before I remember how to click through to the original comment.

Going by what we have now, I think the word 'posted' is a more intuitive place to embed the link. Even better would be to rearrange it so it reads posted at __:__ by _____, with everything up to the word 'by' constituting the link.
posted by mannequito at 8:39 PM on January 19, 2012

You mean, aside from the fact that time timestamp is in MetaFilter-standard yellow link type while everything else in the text is white?

And if you use the white-background option, the timestamp is blue, like all other links.

I sometimes miss and wind up looking at a profile page because the timestamp is so close to the username. That would be less likely to happen if the "at [timestamp]" was after the date, rather than before it.

I don't think making "posted" the link to the comment is an improvement. ,AFAIK, using the timestamp is standard on every other blog that has comments. There may be exceptions, but there's no need to make MeFi one of them.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 3:06 AM on January 20, 2012

I'm sure it was linked to in a MeTa post a year or so ago, but I can't find it now.

It's hard for me to believe, but that interview was eight years ago. I don't think it was ever posted to MetaFilter.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:40 AM on January 20, 2012

no regrets, coyote, jessamyn linked the interview; maybe that's what you remember?
posted by cgc373 at 10:30 AM on January 20, 2012

That's gotta be it.
posted by no regrets, coyote at 10:59 AM on January 20, 2012

if pb sired the permalink, then i am the patriarch of the deleted comment.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 8:29 AM on January 23, 2012