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It works for me.

6 (31.6%)

It does not work for me.

1 (5.3%)

I'd be willing to help test it.

6 (31.6%)

I'm not interested in testing it.

1 (5.3%)

I might be willing to help test it.

5 (26.3%)

Total Members Voted: 14

[Angle]

And we pushed a new update! Now with edit and report functionality, and without the massive layout bug that would put posts on top of each other.

[Angle]

We've been adding lots of little things - better support for mobile browsers, bbcode, proper gravatar support, etc, but we're thinking we need a proper road map. Would anyone be interested in helping us come up with one?

[Angle]

For anyone who's interested, we're holding this conversation on the Agora test server right now. It's the long trailing conversation, you can't miss it.

https://agora-2866.nodechef.com/

[Angle]

I just pushed a change to how posts are displayed at different zoom levels, somebody take a look and tell me what you think?

https://agora-2866.nodechef.com/

[Antsan]

I'm looking at this on a 1920x1080 monitor and for that long thread it seems like at the zoom levels where the, uhm, headers are still missing, there's a lot of unused space to the sides. Maybe stretch the visible levels out so that they stretch over the whole screen horizontally? I think that would make it look less cramped.
I'm not sure how exactly that could work, though. If the currently visible nodes are spread evenly across screen width, how do you handle the user scrolling sideways?

Also when zoomed in very far the levels stay aligned, which means that a discussion with short posts takes up the same vertical space as a discussion with very long posts. This does seem a little more important to me than the issue above.

Maybe arrange the topics in columns at a certain zoom level and instead of a continuous scroll, let users do whole-column-scrolling. The question is what columns to consider when scrolling, because not all columns are "filled" equally far.

When zooming out so far that only dots are visible the dots that were expanded before seem to be loading something. That seems like a bug to me – you're displaying the same dot as everywhere else, what are you loading?


Overall this does look a lot better than when I last looked at it, though.

[Angle]

I'm looking at this on a 1920x1080 monitor and for that long thread it seems like at the zoom levels where the, uhm, headers are still missing, there's a lot of unused space to the sides. Maybe stretch the visible levels out so that they stretch over the whole screen horizontally? I think that would make it look less cramped.
I'm not sure how exactly that could work, though. If the currently visible nodes are spread evenly across screen width, how do you handle the user scrolling sideways?

Yeah, I'm not sure how to deal with that either. Especially given that a thred might suddenly baloon out, and theres no way to predict how many nodes you're gonna have next to each other other than counting them, so you could end up with really wide flat nodes.

Also when zoomed in very far the levels stay aligned, which means that a discussion with short posts takes up the same vertical space as a discussion with very long posts. This does seem a little more important to me than the issue above.

I figured the answer to that would just be to let people zoom in more or less as they pleased? So in a discussion with larger nodes, people will naturally zoom in farther to see them? How does that work out for you in practice?

Maybe arrange the topics in columns at a certain zoom level and instead of a continuous scroll, let users do whole-column-scrolling. The question is what columns to consider when scrolling, because not all columns are "filled" equally far.

I'm not sure I know what you mean. Like, have solid columns show up that users can scroll normally? How does that work with splitting conversations?

When zooming out so far that only dots are visible the dots that were expanded before seem to be loading something. That seems like a bug to me – you're displaying the same dot as everywhere else, what are you loading?

Did they disappear after a second? The loading spinners often hang around for a second or so for me, but they disappear pretty quick after that. :/

Overall this does look a lot better than when I last looked at it, though.

Thank you!

[Antsan]

I figured the answer to that would just be to let people zoom in more or less as they pleased? So in a discussion with larger nodes, people will naturally zoom in farther to see them? How does that work out for you in practice?

The problem is not the discussions with larger nodes but the ones with smaller nodes. Those just are spaced out very much vertically. Actually, they are spaced with constant height and I guess that's my problem. When zooming in so far that I can comfortably read the text in the smaller nodes, I can see three at once on my monitor with 1080 pixels of height. I'd like to see more. Aligning vertically related nodes top-to-bottom would seem more sensible to me.

I'm not sure I know what you mean. Like, have solid columns show up that users can scroll normally? How does that work with splitting conversations?

Conversations don't rejoin in the current view, as far as I can see. Arrange nodes only in columns instead of a grid. Columns can contain a splitting conversation by containing n columns where the conversation splits into n parallel conversations.
"Scrolling by column" would then mean that there are buttons at the left on and the right. Clicking on one of those would move the view by one column into the appropriate direction. So you'd basically scroll between parallel conversations.

Vertical scrolling would work as it does currently.

Did they disappear after a second? The loading spinners often hang around for a second or so for me, but they disappear pretty quick after that. :/

Yes, they disappear. I'm just confused that they show up at all when zooming out to a level where the graphic to put into their place is a constant.

[Angle]

The problem is not the discussions with larger nodes but the ones with smaller nodes. Those just are spaced out very much vertically. Actually, they are spaced with constant height and I guess that's my problem. When zooming in so far that I can comfortably read the text in the smaller nodes, I can see three at once on my monitor with 1080 pixels of height. I'd like to see more. Aligning vertically related nodes top-to-bottom would seem more sensible to me.

Hmm, yeah we can see about dynamically spacing nodes. At a guess though, this is gonna be a real pain to implement. How important do you think it is? :/

Conversations don't rejoin in the current view, as far as I can see.

Well, not yet. They probably will though, once we reimplement that feature.

Arrange nodes only in columns instead of a grid. Columns can contain a splitting conversation by containing n columns where the conversation splits into n parallel conversations.
"Scrolling by column" would then mean that there are buttons at the left on and the right. Clicking on one of those would move the view by one column into the appropriate direction. So you'd basically scroll between parallel conversations.

Vertical scrolling would work as it does currently.

So you mean columns within columns? That sounds awfully complicated. How does it work when you have constant splitting? Do posts that would currently be above each other but not directly connected appear in the same column? Or do you mean more like reddit? :/

Yes, they disappear. I'm just confused that they show up at all when zooming out to a level where the graphic to put into their place is a constant.

That's just the code being slow to catch up. Not sure how much I can do about that but I'll take a look at it at some point.

[Antsan]

Hmm, yeah we can see about dynamically spacing nodes. At a guess though, this is gonna be a real pain to implement. How important do you think it is? :/

It does slow down reading a bit since this means more scrolling and scrolling means loading nodes. Testing it out it's pretty minor, though.

Well, not yet. They probably will [rejoin] though, once we reimplement that feature.

Hm, okay, that does change things a bit.

So you mean columns within columns? That sounds awfully complicated. How does it work when you have constant splitting? Do posts that would currently be above each other but not directly connected appear in the same column? Or do you mean more like reddit? :/

Yeah, that was the idea, definitely not like reddit. Those two questions to show some serious problems with my imagined approach, though, and so do rejoining conversations.

[Angle]

It does slow down reading a bit since this means more scrolling and scrolling means loading nodes. Testing it out it's pretty minor, though.

Hm, okay, that does change things a bit.

Yeah, that was the idea, definitely not like reddit. Those two questions to show some serious problems with my imagined approach, though, and so do rejoining conversations.

Well, as it happens, I'm currently thinking that I'll be working on changing the layout eventually. Not sure how exactly, but I'll figure something out. probably be more or less like it is now, but with a different algorithm for arranging nodes. I think I'm gonna implement federation (Different servers talking to each other so you can view posts on any of them from any other.) via ostatus first though? And probably proper user profiles and alerts and all that. Though I might get someone else to work with layouts...

[Angle]

Just pushed that change I was talking about, making some posts display little previews when you're zoomed out. What do y'all think?

[Angle]

Added email verification, some more navigation buttons on the side, and better adjustment of the layout when new posts are added. Now I'm looking at updating the users profile pages, adding functionality for tracking which posts have been seen, and maybe also a proper system for alerts?

[Angle]

Hey all, I went and added a feature to show new posts. It works off of cookies right now, which is kinda buggy. I might go and make it use the server instead? Though I'm kinda worried that would eat up large chunks of my database. I'm also not entirely sold on the current visual indicators for seen vs unseen posts. Maybe take a look and tell me what you think? :/

[Angle]

Alright, still working on this. I updated the post preview functionality, so it shouldn't overlap anymore. Tell me what you think? :/

https://agora-2866.nodechef.com/forum

[dorf]

Nice to see this is still being worked on.
The preview feature is functional and cool-looking.
The zoom feature and moving around the graph is sluggish for me on almost-latest version of Chrome on Windows.