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Skud, etc.Skud, etc.Posted Aug 28, 2009 21:04 UTC (Fri) by Skud (guest, #59840)In reply to: Skud, etc. by Skud Parent article: FSF to host a mini-summit on Women in Free Software
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UI-wise, some easier visual distinction between commenters might be useful, especially in long threads like this one where I am scanning to see what's going on. Many sites use Gravatar.com to provide commenters with distinctive user pictures, for example.
The amount of text on this line:
Posted Aug 28, 2009 20:47 UTC (Fri) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link]
Is overwhelming and hides the poster's name. Compare eg. the comment format used by Dreamwidth here: http://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/10630.html#comments
As you can see, it makes the names stand out more, and de-emphasises the timestamps etc. Note also the folding of long sub-threads.
(Log in to post comments)
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 28, 2009 21:14 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
by the way, there is a greasemoneky script that was created for lwn.net that pretties up the page, folds subthreads, etc. I don't use it so I can't give you pointers to it offhand, but that is an option.
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 28, 2009 21:20 UTC (Fri) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]
Heh. I didn't realize that Comments/unread was subscriber-only. Yeah. It would be very hard to follow this conversation without it.
Before Comments/unread was available someone made a greasemonkey script to highlight new comments in lwn threads. I used it for a while.
To be honest, though, this is an absurdly long thread for lwn.net. Most articles rarely breach 50 comments. And lwn.net isn't really a 'social networking' or 'community' site (I'd never pay for one).
It's primary purpose is as a news publication, and while it does do 'aggregation' and announcement publishing, the real value of the site comes from the in-depth articles they produce, by doing real reporting (interviewing people involved, digging through mailing lists, source files, changelogs, etc). Nobody else in our esoteric little community is doing anything like it, and it's what makes lwn.net worth paying for, imho.
Using avatars, etc. would be giving way too much importance to the comments section of the site, which like the 'aggregation service,' is a secondary component. Again, imho.
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 28, 2009 22:38 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Oh, gods, yes. I'd pay to turn avatars *off*. Horrible things.
I can recall no more than three or four LWN comment threads as long as this one. (Personally I find it more readable than, say, geekfeminism's comment formatting by a long chalk. It's very hard to figure out the nesting of comments on there, for me anyway.)
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 28, 2009 23:58 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
> Using avatars, etc. would be giving way too much
> importance to the comments section of the site
I don't like avatars myself, but I have to disagree with the idea that it's bad because it would be focussing too much on the comments. For me, it's the quality of comments that makes me follow LWN.
(Maybe giving each person an coloured mark would be good. It could be autogenerated based on their account number or a rolling-over number based on some numberised version of their login name. Maybe.)
Skud, etc. Posted Aug 29, 2009 22:09 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Instead of a coloured mark, just colour the title background mod their subscriber number. (For real utter O(n^2) overkill, hunt for a set of colours such that all individuals in a given conversation have an unchanging colour, and that all A->B->C response sequences use maximally distinct colours. ;) )
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