A bit of housekeeping for the episode discussion posts

[jae]

Well, the good news is that the episode discussion posts have been enormously popular--thanks so much to everyone who's joined in and helped make them such a resounding success!

The bad news is that they're so popular that if someone watches the episode late and wants to jump in after a day or two, they often don't know where to start in terms of reading the discussion that's gone before (since reading it all often isn't an option for a busy person). Of course anyone can always start an entirely new thread at the bottom, and that's great, but some people want to read some of the other discussion, and it would be nice to make it easier for them to do that.

So treonb and I had the idea that we'd like to encourage people to use the subject headers more. What this means is that when you're leaving a comment, it would be great if you could give your comment a subject having something to do with what the comment is about. This can be done when you're starting a brand new thread, where you could call your comment something like "Jae's thoughts upon first watching", but you can also add a more specific subject header when you're responding to someone else's comment (or change the one that's already there), like this:



If everyone does this, then when threads get long and the comments stop appearing in full, they will no longer look like this:



...but instead like this:



...and then people can click on the "expand" link for just the particular threads that sound intriguing to them based on the subject lines.

This isn't a change in official community policy for commenting or anything, so don't worry if you forget! We're just trying this out to see if it makes things easier. Because maybe even if only some people do it, it will have the effect of making the discussion posts seem less daunting.

And once again, thanks to everyone for participating! Treon and I are both so excited about how well the discussions have been going.

Comments

[sistermagpie]

This is a great idea!

[soupytwist]

Oh awesome, even if not every comment thread will work under that system, I bet enough do that it becomes easier to navigate the conversation! What a good idea. :D

[georgley]

Great idea! It does get pretty hard to keep up with after a day or so.

Reformatting threads?

[katiac]

Out of curiosity, is it possible for the discussion threads to be formatted any other way? (It may not be.) TWOP does a straight one-column answer and then starts a new page after so many responses. Other sites have it where you can start new threads about a certain subject and have all responses in one column.

I think the subject thing will definitely help. The thing I've found that makes it most difficult for me to use (just in the last few weeks after it exploded (yay!) is that it gets so long after a day or so that it takes a long time to scroll through all the responses on a single page and I can't easily tell if someone has made a new response and where to go to find it. One thing that's a great feature is when you can jump to like an opening page (like TWOP) and see a thread bolded if there has been a new response you haven't read yet. That makes it a little easier to navigate without having to scroll through.

Re: Reformatting threads?

[treonb]

I don't think the discussion formats can be changed, but Dreamwidth has other ways to help you out follow conversations.

Tracking - every comment/thread/post has a a little 'bell' icon. Go to post you want to follow and click the bell icon. It will open up a 'message managing' window that allows you to be notified of any new message to that post. Notifications go to your DW mailbox, and if you request - your email.

It would have been ideal to allow tracking of posts in advance based on tags, but I can't see that option..

You can also decide to track certain comment threads etc.

Re: Reformatting threads?

[jae]

I should mention that in some journal styles it's a link that says "track this" instead of a bell, but it's the same deal. :)

-J

Re: Reformatting threads?

[treonb]

Actually, you can change the format and flatten out the comment threads. Take a look here: http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=42

You can flatten out the comments, or look only at the top level comments and then drill down.

Once you've got a thread going, you've got an option at the bottom of every comment (or in your notification email) to open that thread. I use that a lot, opening up new tabs for different threads. That way, there are less comments on the page and they're all opened up.

Re: Reformatting threads?

[katiac]

Thank you for your help. I'll try these things out and see if they work better for me this week!

Re: Reformatting threads?

[jae]

Folks on earlier time zones already beat me to responding to this, but yes, there's another way of formatting it! I've never done it myself (I actually really, really like threading and miss it on sites that don't have it), but if you want, you can always switch over to reading things in "flat" mode. And like Treon mentioned, it's also possible to use the subscription feature for individual threads that have caught your eye or even (if you're a glutton for punishment) the entire discussion.

-J

[wendelah1]

I was going to suggest this because I'm always going to be late (because of being on the West Coast). Currently I find the comment threads hard to follow. Maybe this will help. Thanks.