This pony is mostly decorative

November 15, 2017 1:38 PM

On the Recent Activity page, where it says "X Comments. Y since your most recent comment." Could it also say "Most recent: Z time ago." or somesuch?

I know that the Recent Activity page is a already heavy for the servers, so I totally understand if the answer is just a flat out no. I thought it might be fairly doable just because the information is already on the page, and it might be possible to duplicate it further up in the display without significantly adding to server load or page weight.

As it is now, when I open the page on relatively slow moving threads, I have to scroll past 9 comments to see if the last one is new. Then if there's something new in the first thread, I do the same thing again to see if there's something new in the second thread. I can stop once I get to a thread that has nothing new, but it would be nice to be able to just not scroll past that last thread because I could see from the top of it that there is nothing new since I last looked at Metafilter based on a timestamp.

This is admittedly a small thing, and it never bothered me on desktop, but I have been reading MeFi on the bus lately and on mobile, scrolling past a few longish comments can take awhile.

posted by jacquilynne to Feature Requests at 1:38 PM (5 comments total)

Our first response to anything with RA is -- as you anticipated -- that we really don't want to complicate or add anything to the difficulty of putting that page together. I do hear you about the extra scrolling being kind of a pain especially on mobile.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 1:40 PM on November 15, 2017

Spitballing: what about adding some sort of anchor to the each of the posts on recent activity and then a small link (maybe only on mobile) to "next post" so one can jump through posts on recent activity? I would find it useful to be able to easily skip threads (ok, mostly just the megathread) on RA on mobile if I'm not interested in reading the posts there at the moment but don't want to drop it from my RA altogether.

I'm no developer but I suspect that should be considerably easier on the server than something that needs to be re-calculated every load, and it'd allow for one to jump to the last post by jumping down and then scrolling up.
posted by mosst at 1:50 PM on November 15, 2017

If what mosst proposes is too much for the page, would a "collapse" toggle for comments threads be possible? You'd see the title, but be able to toggle the comments off and keep scrolling.
posted by zarq at 2:50 PM on November 15, 2017

On a phone?
posted by zarq at 3:01 PM on November 15, 2017

A collapse toggle is a possibility—I think we might have even batted that around before in MetaTalk at some point—though as basically a nicety I can't say how quickly we'd be able to get at it even if we settled on "yeah, sure thing", which I'd have to review some more before getting at.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:13 PM on November 16, 2017