Threaded Comments Are Live!

And Auntie68 has also paid a visit in the last few months to change her profile photo. In fact she had changed her name, but has changed it back in the last month or so. Is she still banned from posting? - its been 18 months now.

I'm not sure if Bazza has disappeared completely. He's been back in the last few months to change his profile photo.

Hey, yes, I don't think there is activity on the forum any more. It's the legacy of an earlier age of CPod. I think Bazza (a former user) set it up. It was always a bit odd to have both, but actually there's some fun stuff on there if you have a nose around.

How weird to have both! I can see why these community threads are more successful - they're linked from the main site, contain much more effective filtering, and the phpbb has fallen victim to the fragmentation of topics into multiple forums, which always destroys coherent community building. It must be super difficult to reply to every query both here and on those forums, poor staff!

Combining the two into a coherent middle ground would be sensible. Sensible threading (a la gmail...) along with the integrated filtering and clear labelling.

Here's me blathering on, like there's been no thought given to this!

It's called forum.chinesepod.com ;)

(it's a joke, chinese medicine fans!)

Ah well, it's an approach that works for chinese medicine, I guess.

Yes, they are trying to standardize the appearance of this site in other ways - fonts, colours, etc, but they insist on using this non-standard, highly illogical format for messages. Standards are standards for a reason - they have proven over a long period of time that they work. I suspect CPod does not want to admit they have wasted a large amount of time and resources reinventing a rather rickety wheel.

Is there any reason a standard internet message board format isn't followed. e.g. with topic titles in a list - you then click into each one and read the whole conversation? You know, the kind of standard phpbb format which is familiar elsewhere. It's taking quite a lot of effort for me to get used to the narrow lengthy format of the comments here (but I'm trying!)

Thank you for all your work on that.

It's not only following certain conversations that we're aware exist and which interest us, as I think you know. It's simply hard to read and follow a fragmented discussion in general because we're getting such limited views of the whole in our screens. Yes you scroll, but then you forget what was up above by the time you're halfway down (and it's no longer scrolling down chronologically). More hard work we're asking you for, but I hope there can be a way to get a view of the whole for each discussion. I think this is important for threaded comments to be really good.

Yes, I forgot to mention that. You are always taken to the most recent page, regardless of which page the comment is on.

It's not just from the list of comments on our profile pages. I just posted a question in "QW - Taking it All Off" but it was in response to one of the "older comments". If you click on that conversation you're only taken to the newest discussion page.

Agreed. This is a problem we're working on.

More or less... We're not going to see changes in the number of Newbies posting that quickly, though.

sure. If you want to prevent such thinks from happening, you just store the time stamp of "last time user x clicked on a link (on our site)" and use this as the reference point. All comments newer than "last time user x clicked on a link (on our site)" are marked as new.

I often stay logged on all day, and check every few hours for comments. Will the comments posted in these few hours be recognised as new in such a system?

yeah sure, every board/forum out there has the function that it can reveal to its users which comments have been written since he last logged in. Why should chinesepod not be able to do so - every comment has a time stamp. every session has a timeout (therefore also a time stamp). Every comment newer than the moment you left the site would be per definition for you new when you come back.

But Matthias, what is the definition of a new comment? It depends on the user, and when he/she last visited that board.

Hey John,

I would stick to 2 comments, to keep the board tight. As you probably noticed, our only concern is to overlook comments, especially since they can appear now everywhere.

How about using color coding for new comments - either as a bar around (or at the side) the original post or a background color for new posts?

Matthias

2 or 5 makes no difference to me. The main issue by far is finding the new posts.

I prefer 2 comments. It keeps the board tidier, and it isn't all that difficult to view all the comments.

OK, thanks for the replies, guys, and thank you for waiting patiently! :)

I'm not sure you answered my earlier question, though: is displaying 5 comments rather than just 2 in a long thread better, or is it really just missing the point? (I know some of you just don't want the threading period, and would rather everything be in chronological order.)

We like the threading for two main reasons: (1) it makes it easy to pair academic questions with their answers from the team, and (2) it makes it easy to skip conversations you're not interested in. (Yes, we do get a lot of feedback from lurkers who never post but regularly read the comments, and wish it were easier to skip the tangential conversations not focused on lesson content.)

well, if you consider the definition of Web2.0 as read/write web, I agree. I guess newsgroups have spread out as blogs, boards, wikis and social webs.

@matthiask

Yes, I take your point; I see my error above suggesting that they are the same thing. Somehow, after brief flirtations, I let both of them go.. ;-) I think that newsgroups really just transformed into websites with opportunities for sharing information didn't they? And business transformed them (think Microsoft user groups.)

actually, newsreaders differ from newsgroups tremendously

The first computer I had on my desk was an Apricot, not that this is any kind of competition.. :-)

Before that I used to play with the aforementioned text editors.

Before that I marked up cards that were fed into a card reader..

And in the beginning there were slide rules..

谢谢Orangina，你是真厉害

Gosh, don't say that bodawei, newsgroups were still around in the late 90s! The first computer I remember was an Apple II, with floppy discs that were actually floppy.

Newsgroups organised their discussions really well! They're much better than web forums.

@Sebire

You are showing your age talking about News readers. :-) That is the same as newsgroups isn't it? Or am I showing my age? [This is so much fun - reminds me of the days of word processing using text editors on mainframes.]

It's not change that's the issue, it's just that we've all made our points. Google Reader's just an RSS reader though, it doesn't do proper threading like Google Groups does (but even that's not brilliant). I have to admit, I've never seen really satisfactory threading in a Web environment. If I could use my current RSS feeder like the old News readers to open and close threads, and post to the boards, then I would probably access the community like that. And this reply box still isn't big enough!

要不“胖也”。。因为你有一只胖狗，而且是相近你的当前用户名，而最后这个用户名一点听起来“朋友“

Looks like I'd better change my username, hehe.

I know I am not John, but as I also enjoy occasionally showing off I will do so now by telling you how to bold something using html. Type <b>text you desire to be bold</b>. If you want to italicize type "i" instead of "b".

No John, CHANGE itself was not the problem, not even Changye. We were just waiting patiently for you to fix it. You know, like we usually do.

So, the next little job is to teach us non-techies how to use HTML to bold (show-off!). And put it into the Resources section for future reference. Shouldn't be too hard?

Seriously, thanks for the big effort to get it right.

I must be getting tired. On first reading I thought you wrote: The fact that this discussion has died down so much already makes me wonder if changye himself was the root of the problem.

Seriously though, most discussion die because people have already said what they wanted to say - there aren't a great number of option that can be discussed.

thanks for your reply John,and fair enough.I've never used or looked into Google Reader so I can't answer that,but I think you've got my drift anyway.

Bababardwan,

I agree that would be awesome. Functionality something like Google Reader?

Your suspicions are right, though... it's not trivial tech work.

Actually John,as well as the ability to expand/collapse replies,what I'd love more than anything is the ability to somehow mark [even a little box to tick] comments I've read.What would be even better than that for me would be the ability to come along later and display only posts that I hadn't already read in a thread[but then also the ability to undo this if I wanna see 'em all again].It could just be another word like "read" next to the current word "reply".I'm no techie so this may be a lot harder than it sounds but I just thought I'd throw it out there.

The above change has been made (long threads now display the newest 5 comments).

Thoughts? The fact that this discussion has died down so much already makes me wonder if change itself was the root of the problem.

(We still need a better system for tracking new comments and replies to one's own comments, though!)

That's cool. Actually, it isn't an urgent issue for me, but I'm glad you guys are on the ball.

Xiaophil,

I agree that changes are needed to the Community board. Users need a way to identify all the newest comments, but there are quite a few ways we can go about doing this.

One of our designers is currently reassessing our site-wide CSS, specifically to address the font size issue and get it in line with best practices.

Hey John,

Forgive me if someone already mentioned this, but maybe you can alter the community board. You could instead of listing only the most recent comment to a particular post, you could list the last several comments and allow us to directly go to whatever comment we are interested in by clicking on a link. This would require more space on the board, but it seems to me you could make more room by making the font smaller. I think the font size is a little larger than it needs to be.

Just an idea.

Pretty much.

The positives as I see them.

1. It neatly solves the new comment issue.

2. As discussed on another thread, it might encourage more lurkers to post, as each thread feels more independent of the rest (than at present), and they may feel less like they are cutting into a private conversation.

3. It looks neater and is easier to use than the current system.

Possible drawbacks:

1. Implementation - I don't know how difficult this would be for you.

2. A possible loss of the intimate feel we get under the current system.

go_manly,

I see your example doesn't do the "every layer of reply is indented" thing, so the super-wide layout isn't actually necessary. But it also appears that the threading is only one layer deep, i.e. if a post has 50 replies, all of these replies are simply "replies" to the original post, and none of them are replying to each other, even though you can clearly see (by what people quote) that they're not always replying to the original poster.

So the question is: how is this different from what we have now?

I guess you're advocating (1) a different layout which shows more current topics, as well as (2) reverse chronological ordering of comments. Is that right?

John, just wondering about your opinion on the example of true threading as shown in my link.

1. desirable or not?

2. feasible or not?

And if both desirable and feasible, is it a short-term possibility, or something which requires a lot of work (and finance)?

那，情况下你应该只减肥，好吧。

The other thing is our avatars take up a lot of space too.

Another suggestion: How about a much smaller font? Works for Facebook...

Dear John

Generally I am a supporter of the innovation - I don't want to return to the original.

But I think that unless you monitor the Community board fairly constantly it is indeed more difficult to find new comments. They quickly become lost in the 'hidden chambers' (thanks zhenlijiang, above.) It reminds me of those shoot'm'up games like Wolfenstein! And it is time consuming to open all the doors.

I guess I would like to query the wisdom of the current scheme of collapsing the comments (yes I note the stated reasons.) But I have just spent a few hours on a newspaper site and on the ABC site - that's theh Australian ABC; both sites have threads with hundreds of comments. Neither site collapse the threads (one just has a small indent). Both look 'clean'. They just have the 'A's reply to B' links. And I have to say that even though there are hundreds of comments they are easy to use and follow.

Without wishing to make too much of this, the THEORY I think in collapsing the thread is that the collapsed bit is 'off topic'; the real learning bits remain un-collapsed. But it seems evident to me that this is not borne out in practice. I don't think that the collapsed bits are necessarily less educational than the un-collapsed bits of the thread. If I am right, what is the justification for the collapsing function? I don't think that we can argue that it makes the search for educational content quicker or more efficient.

bodawei

zhenlijiang,

I've spoken with the ChinesePod staff that routinely comb the comments, specifically asking if the new threaded comments make it harder to find the new comments. The response was, "maybe a little bit."

I get the sense this is a bigger deal to the users.

It's bigger now. (3 lines instead of 2)

go_manly,

When you say full/true threading, you mean that every reply is placed under the comment it is replying to, indented, right?

The problem with that is we don't have a lot of width to work with. We could maybe do three levels deep, but after that, it starts getting silly narrow.

If we were redesigning the whole site, it might be an option, but for now, we still want to do iterative improvements to the current platform.

You'll notice that sites with full/true threading tend to have really wide layouts.

fair enough.hehe,I'm a bigger fan of your idea than you are.I'm not sure it sounds like so much of a compromise [which makes me think of having a bit of both but the whole of neither..whereas your solution sounds more like just having the option to toggle between the full version of both].It reminds me a bit of the ability on this site of having both simple and traditional characters on the site,catering for both crowds.I think if John thinks it's feasible then it's sounding promising,but it all depends on the general will.I can't help but wonder about uservoice...or at least some voting system.But anyway,the main thing is that CPod as always are listening.Jiayou. :)

I'm afraid my suggestion is not my first preference. In order:

1. The old system

2. FULL (true) threading

3. My suggestion

4. The current system

The first 2 are easy to use. The other 2 are compromises, and compromise solutions tend to be messy.

No worries mate;you earned it.

"While in chronomode, be able to SELECT one of the (new) comments, then switch to threading."

...I must have missed that.Now that is also another excellent suggestion and completes what would be the perfect answer in my humble view. :)

Thanks for the kudos baba.

Don't forget though, there was another facet to my suggestion: While in chronomode, be able to SELECT one of the (new) comments, then switch to threading. The selected comment would then appear as part of the thread, putting in it context. Otherwise, you would still have to go looking for the thread after you switched.

John, I'm just wondering why you haven't suggested fully threaded comments, as described by sebire. Many sites with full threading look EXACTLY the same, suggesting the technology is out there for purchase.

I also like option 1, of the options listed. And I very much like the 'reply' and 'in reply to' links. They alone are worth the new system.

As much as I am getting a kick out of my new html skilz, I would also like to see it be easier to do fancy things to our comments in replys. Because we want everything!!! Bwahahahahahahaaaaaa!!!!!

sorry, I am in a particularly good mood today, as a result of learning some chinese sign language.

John,

I personally vote for option 1 [kudos to go_manly for first suggesting it].

"I hope everyone can see the value of the "Reply" and "in reply to" links."

..definitely..很酷 【very cool].

(I hope I have proved that I'm both listening and acting on your suggestions)

..absolutely..as always,and much appreciated. :)

John I do appreciate the "Reply to" function; hope it will be working every time soon!

Thanks for your hard work!

Thanks for all the comments, guys. I'm working on the issue. I agree that something is needed to help track all comments.

Some possibilities:

1. Two comment viewing modes: old (strictly in chronological order but keeping the new "reply" and "in reply to" links), new (the current threaded comments)

2. Keep as is, but don't hide long threads

3. Keep as is, but give the user a choice: long threads open by default, or closed by default

4. On the Community page, have two modes: (1) displays only the newest comment in each recently active thread, (2) displays strictly the most recent comments, regardless of which thread they belong to (this page actually worked this way once upon a time, but it was waaayyy too much new content for most people to handle)

There are other options as well.

I hope everyone can see the value of the "Reply" and "in reply to" links. By tracking who is replying to what, we can do a lot of cool stuff in the future, like emailing you a list of all the replies to your comments (in any lesson or thread). In order for this to work, though, we need a system the community supports. I will work hard to implement the changes you guys have asked for (I hope I have proved that I'm both listening and acting on your suggestions), and I appreciate all further suggestions and support from the community!

How would a new comments tab work? Different lessons are new to different users, depending on when they last looked at the thread. In any case, these boards are going to start looking like a patchwork quilt if all these recommendations are followed through. I still think the suggestion I made elsewhere has merit, but I think there are only 2 sensible solutions: Use true threading, or revert back to the working system we had before. If it ain't broke ...

Agree. Something like that is definitely needed. Seems to be the one major item that got overlooked in this upgrade.

I agree with Changye. A "Recent comments in this thread" would help. Ideally with a few lines of preview and a link to jump to that comment. Something like:

simonpettersson said in reply to changye: "I agree with Changye. A "Recent comments in this thread" would ..." (click to jump to this comment)

or, how about a switch, so we can just turn off threading ...

I have visions of threads with new comments floating to the top of the pile. Like in Outlook when you group by conversation.

Changye

That's a pretty good idea. I like the new system, but yeah, it is easy to find the most recent comment but finding the second most recent, if located nowhere near the previous comment, is like finding a needle in a haystack. I think there are several ways around this. Hopefully CPod will look into this.

Hi rjberki

I think that "Threaded Comments" is good only when you read old threads that are not active anymore, which is not necessarily a bad thing, hehe.

yes, it is hard to find the latest comments. Everything is now out of order. Many comments will be lost in the netherworld of orig comment dates and times.

go manly

I wanted the threading system. I am satisfied with it in the fact that now we can go on tangents without feeling like, whoa, we are crowding out people who just want to learn something. However, I do not like the confusion it has brought with it. Personally, I don't think the solution is just to go back to the old system. I think, or perhaps I should say hope, we can have our cake and eat it too, i.e. I would think CPod could make some tweaks and mostly satisfy everyone.

Hi zhenlijiang

I got it. I personally don't like "wide column" as it's not so easy to read horizontally-stretched comments, although I admit that "wide column" can save vertical space as you said. 我纳闷儿了！

By "column" I meant the width of this comments area (in relation to the page), not the little box in which we type. And yes I'd say the format quite effectively deters me from going on too long here. But if I really wanted to rant, I only have to comment outside of the thread.

Hi zhenlijiang

"these will take up substantial (vertical) space."

That's right, and this is the reason I think the column should appear only after you click the "reply" link. I suspect that this small column is for preventing people from posting a long post, hehe. Incidentally, this comment was written using the original (big) column located at the bottome of this page, and I copied and pasted it.

We don't only see two lines unless we expand the thread, we see two full comments, which is another thing. The narrow width of the column dictates that these will take up substantial (vertical) space.

* Thanks to Orangina for the

HTML link!

I know a lot of people were asking for threaded comments. I'm interested in knowing how many of these people got what they were expecting out of threading. Were you expecting the system described by Sebire? Does the present system serve the purpose you were hoping for?

The only advantage to this threaded system is that when there is a debate/heated discussion (example: the one in the Elementary: Getting Taller) we see only two lines unless we expand the thread. The big negative is that when you edit your post, the words of the text stick together. Not user friendly since you need to know HTML language to edit correctly.

You're right, true threading would be much better than what we have here, and probably better than the old chronological listing. But I agree with rjberki that the effort required to implement any form of threading is wasted on this site, when we only get about 50 comments per lesson.

Well, the precise issue is that I just saw your message pop up in my RSS, and then when I came to find it on the board, it was not obvious.

This compromise of one-level deep threading doesn't work well. I think true threading where the most recently active threads are at the top would better. Plus we have this massive side bar of grey to my right...

I also agree that threading on this site has no benefit. In my comment elsewhere, I suggested having the ability to toggle between threaded and chronological comments. Personally, I would choose chronological at all times.

Threading is needed on large boards containing hundreds or thousands of barely related comments. On Cpod, we already had threading in a way - the comments are grouped by lesson. All that has happened is that one more level has been added to the hierarchy, and made everything more confusing in the process.

It would be interesting to see the result if everyone were polled on their preference.

Though the word "threaded" is being used, I suspect that what was wanted was "hierarchy"- an organizing tree. See for example forumsdotchinesepoddotcom and many others.

Since that is standard technology, I'm guessing that there are some constraints, or other priorities, here, about which I can't guess.

Oh dear, there were many requests for threaded comments. I for one like threaded comments in general, like when I used to browse Usenet in the olden days. However, web-based implementations are tricky. I am not sure if this necessarily works because you can't see the new comments. Usenet used to have post titles that you could expand and collapse, and whenever the conversation changed topic, you could change the title. alt.chinesepod is what we need!

Changye - I have to agree. I really see no benefit to this. More clutter and confusion. The comment volume and style here really doesnt justify a need. Myself, and I realize this is just my opinion, I prefer the old way. There were better things IT could have been spending their time doing.

momingqimiao,hehe

I did ... but I'm puzzled again because I now see that your comment has the link even though it's only the second threaded one here ...

zhen,there are a couple of reply buttons of course.You may well have hit the right one,but just to double check,I would have thought that if you hit the red reply button immediately below the comment that you would get the link ,and not get this if you used the reply box already set up below.

OK I see it now ... so, looks like the first 2 threaded comments don't get the link because they're the first two. Is that right?

paul,it's sounding reminiscent of "Being John Malkovich"..but if I post between your posts..have I entered your mind? hehe

千万lets not make it Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.As much as I've loved the journey so far,I really don't wanna erase what 中文 I do have and start from scratch.

Hey, I can reply to myself.. hmm... cognitive after thoughts?

I wonder if it does nesting.

Older replies are collapsed, so it does look a lot more concise...

Hehe, yes, I thought I was also sounding ungrateful. I'm not, honestly!

I agree - a "unread post highlight" feature should be next on the list. Together with "collapse all / expand all" and more than 2 levels (like in the Heise Newsticker as can be seen here).

Greedy as always... :)

"多级评论" works.

That's what you're forced to do already if you're adding your own vocabulary to the vocab list, since there's no tone converter button there, either. It's impractical, but you get used to it.

Yeah, I'm also not overly fond of the small box, but I can live with it. The small box makes proofreading my comment weirder. I am also a bit concerned about not being able to convert to tone marks... I didn't see that ability in html codes. But I suppose I could use an outside pinyin converter and cut and paste.

I foresee a slight problem with no "convert to tone marks" button in the reply boxes. Would that also conflict with the CSS/Javascript?

If you use Safari, you can always resize input boxes yourself. Very practical.

you mean you were beamed up mate? I think you're onto something big.Jiayou.

Huh, my "thank you" post moved from the 多级评论-thread to this one.?

Congrats! Well done!

Testing for "user errors" (read: me :-)! )

Hi john

I think a reply input box should appear only after clicking "reply". I prefer the original size of an input box.

Awesome!

Cool, thank you!

It doesn't turn white for me, it expands to 3 lines. Remember 20-somethings and lower-30-somethings, seeing gets to be much harder work once you've hit a certain age ... not that I have any trouble with that 　（＾ｖ＾）

Yes, but at first I overlooked the grey in grey box...

Henning,

It turns white when you click on it, no?

Changye,

Right, there are javascript conflicts between the rich text editor and the threaded comments. Doing it this way seems like a decent compromise.

You can still do links, bold, and italics in replies if you know a little HTML, similar to how it works in the comments on Flickr and many other sites.

We thought 2 lines was a reasonable size for the reply box. What are you thinking? Three?

Oh, here is the input box...maybe give it a white filling.

Hi John

你们辛苦了。Incidentally, are there no "bold, italic, color" buttons for reply messages? And, the input box is too small.

OK, that CSS issue is fixed.

Double high-five! Wait, one more from the Michigan mitten!

High five back atcha!

High Five!!!

It does show up on the Community page now. That issue has been fixed.

Good work John, I'm sure it will be a fine ChinesePod feature. There is something odd going on - in the new lesson thread, the oldest ones are on page 2, the newer ones on page 1. Is that a 'design characteristic'? :-) Also, how do you know you got an answer if it doesn't show up in Community?

Huh. Seems to be working now. I had some troubles connecting to the server, as well. Maybe it's related. Hopefully it was temporary.

Strange... we've tested in Safari on Mac. Can you send a screenshot to support@praxislanguage.com?

Busy indeed! Thanks, and 新年快乐!

That's not too bad !

Let's try it !

Me too!