Easier comment thread following [LWN.net]

Easier comment thread following

Posted Feb 1, 2007 4:51 UTC (Thu) by njs (subscriber, #40338)
Parent article: An LWN reader survey

It's occasionally happened that I noticed an interesting comment thread that I'd read once when it had n comments now had 2*n comments... but there's no convenient way for me to look and see what's new, except by re-reading the whole thing. Since the high(er) quality discussions are one of the key things that set LWN apart for me, it'd be nice to have some way to do this.

I suppose the Right way is to provide news://lwn.net.

(Agreed that the "subscription period" question could be phrased in a clearer way.)

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Easier comment thread following

Posted Feb 1, 2007 8:45 UTC (Thu) by emj (guest, #14307) [Link]

ah! the seldom implemented "view-post-since-last-visit", it's hard since it's usually "view-new-comments: that I'm interested in" which would mean you only want the new comments on the stories you have read...

Easier comment thread following

Posted Feb 1, 2007 8:49 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

going from n comments to 2*n comments is probably worth re-reading them all to have the context for the new ones.

however the one that bugs me is when an article goes from 90 posts to 100 posts, finding the 10 new comments (and seeing their context) is _hard_

Easier comment thread following

Posted Feb 1, 2007 11:25 UTC (Thu) by tgb (guest, #745) [Link]

...there's no convenient way for me to look and see what's new, except by re-reading the whole thing.

It's not perfect, but http://lwn.net/Comments/ makes following comments a fair bit easier...

Easier comment thread following

Posted Feb 1, 2007 16:01 UTC (Thu) by mrshiny (subscriber, #4266) [Link]

I'd say the Comments page doesn't look that useful to me; a quick glance and I was already lost in conversations that started who knows where. It'd be ok if comments were self-contained, but they're usually not at all. Heck, people don't even quote.

I'd like to go further, though, and say that I'd like an easy way to watch the whole article for comment responses; Currently you can only watch the thread that branches from your first reply. There are some articles where I have nothing to say but would like to read the comments as they arrive; for other articles I post replies but would like to watch all the threads anyway, even the ones I'm not participating in.