Some site business: I’ve enabled a new feature in the comments that might end up being very helpful. We’ve tried to develop a habit here of using “bold” html tags in the comments when we’re replying to a specific person, so that there’s no confusion about who’s replying to whom. This new feature, however, allows you to reply to specific comments in such a way that your reply will be indented underneath the comment to which you’re replying. (If that doesn’t make sense, go to a post that has a bunch of comments, and check out the “reply” option underneath each individual comment.)
I see two advantages to this:
- Conversation clarity – it will always be obvious who’s replying to whom, and we won’t need to bother with the bold tags anymore.
- Ease of joining conversations – especially when you’re catching up on a thread where you’re way behind, and there’s already lots of comments, you’ll no longer have to try to make mental notes about all the things you want to reply to. You can simply reply as you go along.
Let me know what you think about the feature over the next couple days. If it’s disliked overall, I’ll turn it off. Thanks!
Arabella Figg on 
korg20000bc on 
Red Rocker on 
Travis Prinzi on 
PotterMom05 on 
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{ 41 comments… read them below or add one }
I must confess I haven’t tried adopting the habit of using html bold tags. Lazy, I guess.
That’s okay rev. Travis is watchin’ out for ya!
bDaveb, just a test.
See, I don’t know how to do it & I’m too old to learn new tricks. It’s hard enough to use emoticons.
Dave, here’s another test.
Now I’ve got everything bolded. Hmm.
Dave, another test. Maybe I’ll eventually get the hang of it.
revgeorge, I don’t know if you’ve figured it out, but there’s a chart about a quarter of the way down this page that shows how (page down a few times to get to it, or search for the word ‘bold’):
http://www.web-source.net/html_codes_chart.htm
That said, I don’t have anything particularly against the new comment format. It means having to split up comments if they’re meant for three different people, which could get a little annoying. It does, however, help those of us prone to leaving the backslash out of a closing tag on the one time we forget to hit the preview button.
Library Lily, I hope I’ve finally got the hang of this. As for the preview function, I always forget about that.
I’m amused that revgeorge finally decided, now that we don’t need bolds, to bold
I can see how that might be a touch annoying. I also get annoyed, though, scrolling up and down, trying to make sure I’ve replied to everyone.
The other positives I didn’t mention are that tangents and subtopics that develop will be able to be explored and focused on.
We’ll see how it goes and what everyone thinks after a few weeks and make a decision from there.
Will we ever not need bolds?
revgeorge is just boldly going where no revgeorge has gone before!
First blush, I’m not too crazy about the new comment format. I think this way we lose the time sequence. Comments which were posted later appear earlier, and vice versa. When I read I assume that things occur in the same order that I read them, and having that messed with messes up my self-admittedly linear mind and understanding.
I agree that in the strictly by time sequence we do lose track of some comments, but because they are in sequence we can always scroll back and locate them.
I’ll see if it gets easier to deal with after a while.
Still haven’t decided if I’m going to see the new Trek movie yet or not.
I’m trying this as a reply to see how it looks (yes, I saw Travis’ above). I think I agree with you, though, Red Rocker, about prefering it in time sequence. One nice thing about the old approach is I could just zip down to the bottom of a comment thread to see what new comments there are. This way I’ll have to comb through, paying attention to the date tags or rereading/reskimming what I’ve already looked at. Of course, this may just be the usual complaining attendant on the introduction of anything new.
Or you could just click “notify me of followup comments via email”
Really, if everyone hates this, I’ll disable it, even though I like it.
See what I mean?
revgeorge responded at 9:29, while I responded at 9:27. But because he (presumably) replied to LL’s comment, his comment appeared before mine. Enough of that kind of thing and I’ll start feeling like the Guy Pearce character in Memento
Saw it last night (in case you missed my comment over in the haiku thread). It was really good and my husband the true trekkie thought it was great, too. We strongly recommend it (not for under, say, 14’s though; should be rated R, not PG-13, for the violence, like it would have been 20 years ago).
I get enough emails, thank you! And I don’t want to click on that for every post.
If there are enough replies upon replies to a post does it end up long and skinny (one word wide)?!
I can limit how many replies deep it’s allowed to go.
This might not work.
Plus, because I’m responding generally and not replying to any particular comment, I feel like I’m not part of any conversation.
I’m reminded of the plight of Billy Pilgrim in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-five: Like Billy Pilgrim, I’ve gotten unstuck in time.
I’ve decided to mess around with the possibilities of being unstuck in time by referencing a thought which doesn’t actually appear until the end of this thread (absolute time reference of 9:47) although according to the logic of the new format, this comment (which is awareness of that comment) will appear five comments before it (assuming no one else has replied to any of the intervening comments in the three minutes it took me to type this).
I’ll probably break down & see it sometime. Although as the Star Trek series progressed, I got progressively disappointed or disillusioned with the series.
Travis, I’m neither for nor against the reply function change. There’s aspects of it I like & then there’s the aspects that Red Rocker & Lily Luna have mentioned that are also off putting. I’d say leave it for a week or so & see what people think after that time. Either way I’m sure we’ll still have good discussions.
Very true: scrolling up and down can get frustrating after awhile and it’s nice to not have to search so much text. Reply-threads for subtopics could certainly be useful as well.
Conundrum: Do I second you here, or Revgeorge at the end of the thread, in saying I think it’s a good idea to give the new method a fair try, anyway? I think I’ll do both.
I agree all the way, Revgeorge. And three cheers on the bolding.
You’ve gotta see Star Trek! Besides, it can’t possibly be as bad as watching the Cub’s offense for the last two weeks.
The concept behind the reply format is good, but the design is lacking. The idea is to visually group ideas and discussions into easy-t0-distinguish collections. But, it maintains the linear layout. Thus, its design kind of works against the experience its trying to foster.
And its effectiveness, to some degree, depends on people consistently “replying” to the proper threads instead of only scrolling to the bottom of the page. But that may just take some time to adjust to a new communication style.
I can deal with it; it will just take some time to get accustomed to.
See, here’s one of the problems with this reply format: I have to reply to Dave’s comment on the Cubs all the way down here because the reply function only went out to four places or so.
So, here’s my comment on the Cubs: Maybe they’ll fire up since Zambrano’s tantrum. At least that Gatorade machine will stop giving the Cubs sass.
Maybe it’s not the linearity of the layout that’s the problem as much as it is the space afforded to comments. This theme only allows for posts and comments to occupy under half of the white space. On my screen (13.1 inches), that’s only about a third of the total available space.
Responding to the Star Trek thread above, I noticed that continuously replying further and further constricts the comment’s space.
I suggested on a Cubs message board pasting a picture of Michael Barrett on it. Seemed appropriate at the time…
With apologies for my whinging, I’m getting tired awfully fast of playing hide and seek trying to find and read people’s new comments buried among the replies. It was more fun when everything was nice and linear and chronological. Even though it could bounce back and forth, the flow was nicer and quite frankly easier to follow. But maybe the reply format will work better when we’re talking about something substantive like an HBP chapter (she says somewhat dubiously). Time to go take an Advil for my headache.
Nevermind. Back to normal.
And so a 21st century concept gives in to the limitations of minds formed in the 20th century.
And 20th century minds are profoundly grateful.
And suffering from oppositional defiant syndrome as I do, I’m now thinking: the discarded format is actually quite similar to the concept of how the mind (of any century) organizes information: in schema, or categories or nodes, rather than in discrete, linear bits. But to consciously do what the mind automatically does is challenging.
Maybe I’ve got a 21st century mind, or maybe my mind does organize information “in schema, categories, or nodes,” but I was really excited about and enjoying the new format. I’ve always appreciated LJ for that reason – side discussions are able to develop and take on lives of their own. I think Dave is probably right to suggest that space limitations play a large role in whether or not this format is successful.
But I didn’t get this much opposition when I overhauled the whole site, and I can’t have people leaving here needing to pop Advil! If I can work the space limitations out, or if a future version of my blog theme opens up other options that make the threaded comments more intuitive, we’ll give it another shot.
At the very least, revgeorge finally knows how to use bold html tags, and that makes the brief experiment worth it
The other option that might make it work is if I re-set the blog to display single posts without the sidebars. Then, we’d have the entire width of the blog to work with.
If I decide to give that a shot, I’ll put up a post about it and point everyone back to this thread, where there are already lots of nested comments.
Travis: wrote: “At the very least, revgeorge finally knows how to use bold html tags, and that makes the brief experiment worth it.”
That’s true. We’ll always have Paris.
Travis, I am very sorry to have disappointed you when you were so excited about the new format. As I said we can give it another try when we talk about a substantive topic where the topics are more discrete, but we would need to be able to go out to more than four replies. One thing that might make it work better in terms of finding new comments would be to have a longer list of the most recently posted comments. Also, having a little bigger indent for the replies might help with the visual organization, to see the branching and the ends of the individual threads more easily.
Interesting that when you removed the reply function the comments above resorted themselves into chronological order.
Red, not to get too geeky, but you said this about the mind’s organizational habits:
Can you point me to some good sources for cognitive theories on this? How people cognitively respond to stimuli has started to creep into my gaming research quite a bit, and one of my profs is pushing me hard into issues of experience and information design.
If you want my email, let me know…
Dave, my own launching point would be a dictionary of Social Psychology. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Psychology gives a nice, comprehensive if brief definition of the concept, and refers you to some primary sources. Fiske and Taylor (1991), Hastie (1981), and Taylor and Crocker (1981) are good sources. Of course the bias here is towards social schema, but this should point you in the right direction. Look up also the related topic of categorization in the same book for a more generalized look at schema.