Alicornutopia

Yay!

Marri wrote:Updates!

• There's a link icon to the right of a thread's name in the Unread Posts page which... should? take you to the latest unread post. Feedback appreciated, I'm still wary of my implementation of this.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

I am delighted that you managed to make this work retroactively! Was expecting I would have to binge-read all the unread threads to get this to start working.

First piece of feedback: links seem to always be in the per_page=all format--should probably use the user's selected paging preference.

EDIT:
-There are a subset of threads which (1) persist in the Unread Threads page after having been read and (2) do not have a First Unread link. Right now for me this consists of the 3 completed threads (Glamour, Mindflayer Stars, I. Pair of Pawns, Capture Imminent) but also II. Pair of Pawns, Queen-side Castle (which initially had a First Unread link, which as far as I can tell worked correctly, but then after clicking on that link and then returning to the Unread Threads was still there but without a First Unread link).

EDIT 2:
-It seems like a thread is removed from the Unread Threads once it's been accessed, even if only some of the posts have been read (e.g. clicking on III. Pair of Pawns, King-side Castle showed (given my settings) the first 50 posts, but removed it from the Unread Threads page despite there being >50 posts in the thread).

1- Calculating what page things are on given different per-pages is actually kind of complicated, and that was the lazy version; longer term I think I'm going to actually make a way to jump directly to a post, with pagination starting from it. Since I have not built that yet, the link is lazy for now. xD (It's the same as the one you can get from the link button on a post.)

2- There's a bug right now where if a post has replies, but the top post is the most recently edited thing (in this case usually because it's been marked complete) it won't dismiss properly when you open it. I think I need a new database field to work that out; until then, the Mark Read button will work.

3- I think I see what happened; if you've never viewed a post before, it creates a new view record, but isn't respecting the "new view record at this particular time because I haven't read everything yet" part. This one at least shouldn't be too hard to fix.

EDIT: pushed an attempted fix for #3

Marri wrote:longer term I think I'm going to actually make a way to jump directly to a post, with pagination starting from it.

This seems preferable even to always-from-first-post pagination, I approve. (Well, so long as it works sensibly for paging back as well as paging forward; hopefully that's not too hard?)

Adelene wrote:

Marri wrote:longer term I think I'm going to actually make a way to jump directly to a post, with pagination starting from it.

This seems preferable even to always-from-first-post pagination, I approve. (Well, so long as it works sensibly for paging back as well as paging forward; hopefully that's not too hard?)

The paging back is totally the problem xD like. Picture Post A has 40 posts. Your per page is set to 25, so two pages. Post 30 is thus on page 2. You click on Post 30. Do I page backwards with 5-25 and then 1-5? Do I page backwards awkwardly with 1-30? Do I discard the posts outright and make you do Parent / Start buttons like Dreamwidth does?

I may wind up doing like /posts/<post>?reply=<reply>#reply<reply> and just making the code figure out what page you're on (without redirecting like it did in the last version).

What I'd do is when you back up to a page with <25 entries, have it recognize that you're back at the beginning and show 1-25. So if you're on #30 and you hit pageback once, you get 5-29, and then if you hit pageback again you get 1-25.

That was one of the behaviors I suggested but I want sure it'd be behavior everyone wanted, so perhaps it could be a user preference? Depending on how difficult it is to implement.

Adelene wrote:What I'd do is when you back up to a page with <25 entries, have it recognize that you're back at the beginning and show 1-25. So if you're on #30 and you hit pageback once, you get 5-29, and then if you hit pageback again you get 1-25.

+1

What would the options in the preference be?

Counterintuitively, creating too many preferences actually hurts usability. I am opposed to making things preferences without good reason.

DanielH wrote:What would the options in the preference be?

Counterintuitively, creating too many preferences actually hurts usability. I am opposed to making things preferences without good reason.

'When I open a permalink, display it at the top of the screen as though I'm on a Dreamwidth threaded thing, and then let me jump backwards and forwards by X [posts-per-page] posts'
vs
'When I open a permalink, find the correct page for it to be on, and scroll me down to the applicable part of the content'

The former is a lot easier for me, at least when using my mobile, whereas the latter is probably, but not certainly, what most people would want and expect.

Anyway, they're just proposed ideas, not absolute ones, and as it is there are hardly any options, so I think it's a safe bet to allow them. Huge lists of options are definitely confusing to work through the first time, but in my experience, it's actually nicer to have that available and just not use it than to have it not be available.