On Thursday, 13 March 2014 at 19:38:21 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 06:17:27PM +0000, bossfong wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 12 March 2014 at 18:30:37 UTC, Jesse Phillips wrote:
>> >
>> >I don't see anything from that which would make it better for
>> >heated discussion. A discussion is just a thread of replies.
>> 
>> "A discussion is just a thread of replies" is wrong I believe.
>> Discussions often evolve and diverge, whilst threads have a static title and topic.

What Teoh says below, a divergent thread is a new discussion, which may or may not relate to its parent. The only way to separate it is for someone to decide it should be separate.

> That's not true. That's only the limitation of the web interface. NNTP
> threads can have a new subject in every reply, should the need arise.
> AND it keeps track of the parent post, so that if you want to, you can
> actually trace the thread back to the parent thread! Show me a web-based
> forum that can do that, and I might reconsider.

Yeah, the web interface could handle new titles better (currently keeps them nested in the same thread).

>> >Votes are probably the only thing missing because they eliminate
>> >the need for "+1" posts.
>> 
>> I agree. (see, how again some button would have been nice)
>
> Frankly, I rather see voting as a waste of time. Either you say
> something substantial, or don't say it. Getting rid voting *and* +1
> posts will be a good thing (though I'm guilty of +1 posts myself :P).

Sometimes the only thing you need to communicate is that there is more than one person who holds this opinion. Not really for deciding what to do, but to encourage the poster to peruse this point. Unlike Reddit or politics, votes shouldn't be used for moving thread priority or deciding what action to take.

They are mostly meaningless, but can be a moral boost for the poster.

On Friday, 14 March 2014 at 07:26:55 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> On 3/14/14, Kapps <opantm2+spam@gmail.com> wrote:
>> If you have Reddit Gold you can highlight new posts since a
>> previous viewing of that thread. RES then allows you to navigate
>> to new posts.
>
> I don't think you need gold for that, afaik RES has that feature as is.

Nope RES allows you to be notified when a new message is posted, but it won't tell you where it is. And it seems that Gold still fails when the new comment is "below the fold" meaning you'll have to unfold before you can find the new messages.

tldr; Gold still isn't perfect.

On Friday, 14 March 2014 at 09:38:59 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 3/14/14, 2:12 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>> On Friday, 14 March 2014 at 09:03:02 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> As of this very moment, my NNTP client (Thunderbird) shows there are 5
>>> messages unread in the left treeview (http://imgur.com/KHnjcnU), and
>>> displays in a simple list all 223871 messages ever posted in
>>> digitalmars.D with the most recent 5 messages at the top and in bold
>>> text (http://imgur.com/uJ2UdzA). As I select each of those unread
>>> messages, their bold disappears (they become read). If I get bored and
>>> want to mark all news as read, there's a button that does that (or I
>>> could select some and mark as read etc).
>>>
>>> I use threaded views for e.g. github discussions because once a pull
>>> is merged, I archive them all in one shot. But a flat view is a very
>>> simple and effective way of staying abreast of what's going on in the
>>> forum. Again, I feel I'm missing something given that I'm the only one
>>> asking for such.
>>
>> In the horizontal-split mode, you can press the space bar to jump to the
>> next unread message. Does that help? Or is it imperative that messages
>> are displayed chronologically, without threading?
>
> Nothing is really imperative; I'm not asking for features here as much as pointing out what my patterns are. The horizontal split view is pretty nice, I'll use it whenever I don't have my mail client with me. I could probably get used to it but I prefer a flat view.

I use the Webforum in basic mode and it fits my needs as a silent reader very well, but there is one disturbing thing.
Every time a context (subtree) switch takes place in a discussion in the same thread, one needs to read text which was already read just to get the right context.
This is in my opinion very time consuming and exhausting even if you just need to read a few words of the parent post. It's also very much dependent on the authors choice of quoting text.

So I have thought a bit about an improvement.
Wouldn't it be nice if there is a mixed mode view which is quite similar to the horizontal-split view but adds the time sorted linear basic thread list view above the thread tree view on the left side.
If no thread is selected in the basic view, the tree view will be empty because it displays just the selected thread from the basic view.
If one clicks on the 'N new' link in the basic view, the first (in time) unread message will be selected in the tree view (now displaying the entire conversation thread tree) and on the right side of the split the message is displayed.
The switch to the other unread messages in the thread works in a context first manner instead of a time based one. This way one has much fewer context switches which boosts up reading performance and it's less stressful for the mind. (Let's call it Zen-View because of this :-))
If one subtree of unread messages is finished the next unread subtree is selected by time again.

One has also the possibility to skip entire threads via the basic view. With a nice user interface and additional keyboard shortcuts this could probably be a nice addition/change to the existing workflows.

The problem that one post might include answers to different contexts exists, but IIRC this is quite uncommon and shouldn't be done anyway. Maybe this new view leads to even nicer quoting hierarchies.

Thomas

Am Wed, 12 Mar 2014 18:11:50 +0000
schrieb "bossfong" <bossfong@posteo.de>:

> As a "new kid", I'm really baffled by by how much discussion in
> the developers scene is done in mailing lists.
> I strongly believe that mailing-lists are not suited for heated
> discussions on very specific issues. I even belive it's
> counter-productive when comparing the discussion flow with modern
> forum software.
> By modern forum software I mean discussion centric software like
> disqus[1].
> 
> My appeal is it to switch to a more modern forum software (even though I value really much, that the current webforum is implemented in D).
> 
> Is there anything specific holding us back?
> 
> [1] http://disqus.com

I think the perfect discussion and planning forum is yet to be written. From the discussions here we can learn what could be streamlined. For example we don't need repeated threads on the same topic. Also one article per person should be enough, with the possibility to later add more statements.

If you want to argue with someone you would do that by writing a statement and refer to their statement. The same way you could support (read up vote) someone's statement.

This way nothing would get lost in tons of replies and
we don't have to repeat ourselves because someone didn't read
all of the thread.

The whole thing should be focused on resolving issues or maturing ideas and it could well be that one topic will have several sub-topics as different options to solve it. They could also refer to entirely different topics to create a dependency. E.g. a satisfactory containers module could rely on the "allocators" topic and that could have a the precise GC as a sub-topic (even if precise GC would be a top level topic on its own).

So that forum would include what we know as DIPs, the list of language issues and the gist of the discussions on this NG.

:-)

-- 
Marco