Guide to the New Comment Structure
One Newstalkers’ objective is a comment structure that encourages discussion and debate. Oddly, many sites have resorted to strict linear comments 1, 2, 3, … n. (In part because this is very easy to implement.) Each new comment simply falls at the end of the list. This works fine for small discussions but does not scale. Very quickly, people lose track of who is responding to whom.
Threaded Comments
One solution to the scaling problem is to provide what is called ‘threaded’ comments. Threaded comments offer a link from a comment to the comment it has replied to. This is very helpful, but as the list grows it still is difficult to follow a stream of comments. To mitigate this, comments are often organized into a hierarchy. This produces ‘threads’ where each thread is defined by a root comment whose children comprise the thread. For example, a root comment with an id of 3 would define a thread where all children start with 3. (e.g. 3.1, 3.2, …). Note that sub-threads are also possible. 3.2 could define a sub-thread consisting of 3.2.1, 3.2.2, …
The hierarchic structure of comments as shown above is a great way to allow comments to self-organize but it too has limits. After three or four levels it is difficult to comprehend the structure and thus is a new way for people to get lost in the comments.
Hybrid Hierarchy
NewsTalkers’ underlying platform offers a hierarchic structure of threaded comments. This is what has been in place since inception. The move to make this structure more easily understood has required two development efforts: phase I and phase II. Phase I focused on presentation. It limited the nesting of comments as presented to three levels (even though the hierarchy goes well past three levels). It also introduced hierarchic numbering (e.g. 3.2.5) to give information on where the comments are within the structure.
Phase II introduced a hybrid approach. Under phase II, comments are organized into a hierarchy for the first two levels. After that, the comments form a simple list. Every new comment falls at the end of the list. In result, the NT phase II comment structure is now a hierarchy of lists as shown below.
The level three (and beyond) comments (green) are sequentially numbered. The next REPLY to comment 3.3 (in the above example) or to any comment whose ID starts with 3.3 will be 3.3.7.
Summary
The transformation of NewsTalkers’ comment structure is now complete. All comments that have a single id number (e.g. 1, 2, 3 …) or have two id numbers (e.g. 3.1, 3.2, …) are organized in a strict hierarchy. Comments below that will all have no more than three id numbers (e.g. 3.4.2) and will be linearly ordered under their parent sub-thread (in this case, 3.4).
Should be self explanatory, but here is documentation anyway.
Please ask your questions in this blog.
Sounds very interesting and functional, TiG. One of the problems for many Members is the slow loading of comments one the count goes over 300. IT is a bit better since some changes were implemented in the system a while back, but, it is still taking a long time to load the comments.
I myself have had problems keeping track of some comments when there are a good many in between the person posting a comment that I want to respond to and then finding. The Tracker helps some to this end, but, it still makes it hard to keep up with when there are so many other comments in between. Looking forward to trying out the new comments hierarchy.
Unfortunately that will not make a difference. The load performance is a function of number of comments in the scrollable area. It makes no difference which thread (or sub-thread) they are in.
In fact the load performance is strictly browser-related. The server side of the equation is running lightning fast. But it takes time (latency) to transfer all the data to the client (our machines) and (worse) it takes the browser considerable time to do all it must do to render NT comments. Because NT allows very expressive comments (embedded YouTube videos, complex HTML, etc.) many of our comments take time to prepare.
In result, we are taxing our browsers.
The solution (indeed the only solution short of us all buying high-powered client machines) is to cleverly manage the load on the browser (over time) so that it can appear to the user quicker even though it has not actually downloaded and prepared every comment in an article. The NT platform has a paging system that does this to a degree but it is brute force and has problems. We are looking into a more elegant (albeit technically complex) dynamic loading method that exploits the NT hierarchy of lists architecture.
I agree with much of what you have said, TiG, and it does indeed make good sense. I myself use Chrome for my browser as it does tend to work faster for me, but, the number of large image and YouTube inserts do tend to drag the loading time down in what I think are their own load times compared to only text in comments or emojis. My thinking on this may not be correct, but, in comparing the loading time for various articles, it does seem that those with large images and YouTubes in them take a good deal longer to load.
I'm hoping that the new comment alignment as shown will make it easier to locate and keep up with the comments we are participating in. That would be a good plus for Members.
By the way, when will this new feature go into effect?
What happens if one replies to the last level comment amde? That is to say in this example i reply to 3.1.2? Will it start another subthread ..... say 3.1.2.1 and so on?
Lol my Lexdysia is kicking in, i meant "made" not "amde"
Dear Friend Sparty ON: Who among us has not amde a mistake keyboarding?
Smiles.
E.
Thx Enoch
I myself don't have dyslexia, however, my keyboard often seems to. (sigh) And it seems to have a mind of its own by adding or leaving out words in my writing. Seems that computers aren't the only things that try to think of themselves.....(sigh)
To quote Bill Clinton .... I feel your pain girl ....... 😉
The comment structure is live. Try replying to Enoch. Since his comment is 3.1.1 your reply will NOT create a sub-thread but rather will simply become the next in the list. Yours will be 3.1.2
Okay, so it's two sub-threads from the original.
Isn't that the same as before?
Prior to this change, each reply would (in effect) create a new sub-thread. So, for example, we would see:
3
3.1
3.2
3.2.1
3.2.1.1
3.2.1.1.1
3.2.1.1.1.1
ad infinitum. To avoid dealing with long hierarchic numbers (until we were able to build the mechanisms we now have) the hierarchic ids were truncated at the fourth level and an ellipses added at the end. This resulted in the following:
3
3.1
3.2
3.2.1
3.2.1.1
3.2.1.1…
3.2.1.1…
Now, with a hierarchy of lists in place, we have this:
3
3.1
3.2
3.2.1
3.2.2
3.2.3
3.2.4
Based on the way NT users respond, this turns out to be a very good way to structure comments. It provides the convenient hierarchy most of the time with easy to understand numbering. However, when discussions take off they stay rather self-managed. Because NT allows threads (e.g. 3) to be divided into sub-threads (e.g. 3.2) the lists under each sub-thread stay within a workable size.
Also, even when comments are simply listed, we still have the referback information. For example, 3.2.4 might be a reply to 3.2.2 and that information is available in the header for comment 3.2.4 (and we can click on it to navigate directly to 3.2.2 if desired).
That is not what i remember but it works for me either way.
Keep up the good work!
That sounds very helpful. This should make it much easier for Members to navigate the comments. I am really looking forward to seeing this feature implemented.
In the words of Chevy Chase in the movie "Modern Problems", "OHHHHH HA HA HA - IIIIIII like it".
C'mon man! That wasn't cocaine. It was demon dust.
Sheesh!
The problem I have here is Spell Check.
You are supposed to have spell check. You should be seeing a red line under words that are not right. When you see that, put your cursor over the word, and right click and you wil see on top a list of correctly spelled words. Just click on the word that you wanted corrected and you are done.
Must be my computer
right click?
Hey Tig!
Hope you are having a wonderful day......I just read this and have a suggestion. Could we have posts that are less than 8 hours old have their "Number System Identification" show up in Red?
Thanks
TAP
I fail yet to see how the above hierarchy makes it any easier to find out who's commenting on my comments when I look at the "Comments" or "My Comments" tabs. Wasn't that one of the purposes for this effort?
That was not the purpose for this change. The hierarchy of lists structures comments within a discussion. One immediate consequence is the full, visible comment ids (e.g. 4.2.19) for each comment regardless of how deep the replies are nested. The ellipses (...) are gone and all comment ids are always three levels or less.
The comment history (the comment and my comment tabs) was not slated to be changed.
The code is '42'.