I'm a very new RB user and have been tasked with evaluating it to see if it 
is a tool that we want to roll out for the development team at my 
workplace.  As such, I've spent the last few days experimenting and trying 
to think of the concerns that other team members may have.

One item I immediately suspected as an annoyance for some team members was 
the fact that (often lengthy) review entries will always be expanded, 
particularly when they have already been viewed and there are no new 
comments.  As I dug in, I discovered the new feature from UCOSP 2010 by 
Kevin Quinn related to Collapsible Reviews 
(http://www.reviewboard.org/news/2010/12/11/ucosp-2010-project-screencasts/).  
At first I was convinced that this feature did not actually work or had 
been removed, because I was not seeing reviews collapse as I anticipated.  
It wasn't until I checked out the actual code in reviewboard/views.py that 
it made sense.  Here is my interpretation of the code and I'd like to see 
if someone can confirm this:

1) All reviews since the last update to the review request (or since 
initial creation if there are no updates) will *always* be *expanded 
*regardless 
of whether they have already been viewed.  Furthermore, all reviews prior 
to the last update will be *collapsed *unless #2 applies.
2) Reviews prior to the last update will be *expanded *if a comment/reply 
has been added since the review request was last viewed.  On a subsequent 
refresh of the request, these reviews will again be *collapsed *unless 
additional comments have been added.

For reference, here is what I believe to be the relevant code from views.py:

442:            # Mark as collapsed if the review is older than the latest
443:            # change.
444:            if latest_timestamp and review.timestamp < latest_timestamp:
445:                state = 'collapsed'
446:
447:            latest_reply = reply_timestamps.get(review.pk, None)
448:
449:            # Mark as expanded if there is a reply newer than last_visited
450:            if latest_reply and last_visited and last_visited < 
latest_reply:
451:                state = ''



The sticking point for me was the condition on being prior to the last 
update which triggers the ability for something to be collapsible.  I was 
working with a sample request where I had entered several reviews, but had 
not updated the request, and was confounded by the fact that none of the 
old reviews were auto-collapsing.

So, if my understanding of this functionality is correct, then I will raise 
the issue of why does it behave this way?  Why make collapsiblity 
conditioned on an update?  Since I'm new to RB, I feel like I must be 
missing something conceptual about why you wouldn't want to make all viewed 
reviews (without new comments/replies) auto collapse?  I made the following 
simple replacement to line 444 and it seems to achieve the functionality I 
am speaking of:
    if last_visited and review.timestamp < last_visited

Would a change like this, perhaps selectable as a user config option, be 
something that would be considered for inclusion in RB?  I'd be happy to 
open a feature request ticket.  Additionally are there any other 
improvements to collapsible reviews in the pipeline?  Kevin Quinn's video 
mentions cookie based tracking of expanded/collapsed as a item for future 
work.

On a related, but somewhat orthogonal, note, another feature I'd like to 
see is an improved highlighting of what has changed and/or what is new when 
viewing a review request.  Now, with the current collapsibility logic, I 
may enter a request to find that a prior review has been expanded which 
indicates that a new comment has been added.  This review may be quite 
lengthy and span several screens.  As best as I can tell, I now have to 
scroll through this review manually looking at the timestamps of all 
comments to determine which are indeed new.  If these new comments could be 
highlighted, starred, or somehow otherwise made more obvious then it would 
make this a much quicker process.  It might even be nice to have keyboard 
shortcuts here to navigate between new comments, similar to what is 
available on the reviewing page.  Again I'd be happy to open a feature 
request ticket if necessary.

Thanks,
Griffin Myers

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