New Tricks for Old Dogs for Very Long Articles
Category: Meta for use by Perrie RA and moderators. Member meta goes into the group Metafied found on top tab
By: perrie-halpern • 5 years ago • 32 comments
So I just learned a new trick for dealing with very long articles (or any article for that matter). It is very handy for very long articles that take forever to load.
This one comes with diagrams.
You will notice that each thread starts with a 
Hope that helps!
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So how many of you will be using this trick to deal with long articles?
Thanks.
Helpful.
Glad to be of assistance!
Being autistic, I can't seem to stop clicking the +/- thing...
OCD? I have no suggestions other than to click once, then when you feel the urge click on a new article.
I don't do it out of a compulsion to repeat.
I do it because it is fun.
j/k
In all seriousness, I am still getting the hang of the place.
That's cool. Feel free to get me on chat or by private note if you ever need any help... you can find your private notes in the dropdown under your name.
Sometimes, it is not that the article is long, but the ones that have way too much spacing in them from Twitter remarks.
I am not following this. Could you show me an example?
Where it is not a Twitter thing, the seed about the first two R's to endorse Trump are being indicted has a really big open space in it.
Okay, I see. This particular problem can be handled by the seeder using the editor. Just delete the whitespace. Good news though is that this spacing does not affect load performance at all. Browsers render white space for free (basically).
The border wall seed is another example.
Yup, same deal. The seeder controls this. It is a matter of using the editor to clean up the content.
I will. I hate how those articles with over 200 comments slow things down.
Me too!
Oh Noooo..
I'll have to look up suggestions for this.
I get it. I really do. I think. I will practice it several times in the light of day.
To add a little more information.
The reason Perrie suggested to clear the tracker is because the system interprets any uncleared comments in your tracker to mean that you want to go to those comments in the article. This means that when you open the article, the threads containing those comments will be opened for you. And that is good. However, if you have already seen those comments it is best to clear them from your tracker (using the Discard button Perrie shows). That way the system will not open threads for comments you have seen.
The speed for loading an article is a direct function of the number of comments in open threads. Closed threads take zero time.
Also note that when you close a thread the system remembers that you did that explicitly. It will try to preserve that request forever. It will also, by the way, remember when you explicitly open a thread and will try to hold true to your intentions.
Thanks, Tig for your further input.
Dear Friend TiG: Good helpful hints.
Thanks.
Any thoughts on how to skip winter weather?
Smiles.
P&AB.
Enoch.
Huddle together inside with Mrs. E and a warm drink and keep authoring Enoch/RW articles.
Thanks for this. I had never bothered to find out what the trash for, so I just stop following articles if I don’t see anything new for a day or two. Guess I don’t have to do that.
True. You can just use the discard button after you have visited an article. When you press that button you are telling the Tracker that you no longer want to track the listed comments. The Tracker will discard those comment tracks and wait for a new comment to show up on the article. If it does, it will be tracked.
When you cease tracking (as you were doing by using the other button; the hand) you are telling the system that you are done with the article and no longer want it to track new comments for it.
What I would really like is a way to reply to several members at the same time rather than having to reply to 3 different members with the same reply.
That would be handy.
Indeed it would. I just cam across an article where I would like to reply to 3 different members with the same answer. But I can't. Copy and paste is such a waste of space and time.
Given the architecture of the system, the only practical way that could work is for the system to generate three replies (for each of the 3 source comments) but with the same content. That would quickly pollute the comment stream with a bunch of redundant comments. There is no practical way to have a single comment tie back to more than one source comment.
So, offhand, I do not see this as technically feasible. It would be convenient though.
Actually, it is rather feasible. I work in legal technology, or as it is more broadly known, litigation support. I work with online technology every day.
It would be akin to sending an email to multiple persons. It isn't a matter of whether it can be done, it is more a matter of making the code heads think like end users.
This applies to many platforms.
Steve, my comment was based upon my detailed understanding of this site and the platform on which it is based. I am not speaking in general, but rather providing an opinion based on the actual code and data structures involved.
And that's fine. I have done testing on programs that are web based. While I have no idea of how to write the code, most of my suggestions on improvements were able to be implemented. Make the suggestion and have the coders try it.
I've been dealing with tech one way or another since 1980. It isn't a matter of whether it can be done, it's a matter of whether it will be done. And with all things, it should be rigorously tested before being released to the end user.
I did not say this was impossible; almost anything 'can' be done. I noted that this is infeasible. Feasibility deals with factors such as cost, time and risk vs. expected benefit.
I am a professional computer scientist / software engineer / product architect / CTO / founder (retired). I have (also) been building functionality for NT for several years now. So not only do I know how to 'write code', I am very familiar with the actual code and data structures of this site: both NT specific functionality that I developed and the underlying platform.
My opinion was (and is) that even though I like your suggestion, it is infeasible due to platform level design choices: in particular, the choice to implement comments using a threaded tree (critically, that means each node has one and only one parent). Single parentage is a fundamental design assumption of the platform. Changing that design assumption would require not only substantial rework of NT specific code, but the platform developers would have to be encouraged (and paid) to change the platform to this new multi-parent graph structure. The amount of work, cost, risk (in this case the risk of change and the risk of increased complexity), etc. to implement your requested feature is substantial (and I seriously doubt the platform developers would even agree to making the changes).
A tad more detail if you are interested:
The underlying platform for NT implements comments as a strict hierarchy (where each REPLY comment is a child of the (parent) comment to which it replied). This data structure is known (and assumed) by quite a bit of complex algorithms. What you consider to be a simple change (and conceptually it is simple) requires reworking all the algorithms knowledgeable of the tree structure so that they now support multiple parents per node. This changes the class (paradigm) of the algorithms. Ask your developer friends the likely impact of changing the core data structure in a non-trivial software product from a tree structure to a graph with multiple outbound AND inbound edges.
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