On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 10:12 AM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) <
[email protected]> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 8:27 PM, Danny Horn <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> So we've figured out a new reply/indentation model that separates those
>> two
>> functions. We've been testing it out on the flow-tests server [1], and
>> we're going to release it to Mediawiki soon.
>>
>
> I ran some tests at
> http://flow-tests.wmflabs.org/wiki/Topic:Sdrqdcffddyz0jeo. Here are my
> observations:
>
>    - Posts B, C, and I all reply to A, but the ordering is C, I, B. I'd
>    expect replies to the same parent to be ordered chronologically (and I'd
>    personally expect earliest first).
>    - Posts B and C both reply to A, but are confusingly at different
>    indentation levels. I'd expect replies to the same parent to be indented
>    the same.
>    - Posts I and E are at the same indentation level, despite I being a
>    direct reply to A while E is at the end of the chain A→C→D→E. Similar
>    confusion exists elsewhere. I'd expect two posts at the first indentation
>    level under the same parent to both be replies to that parent.
>    - Things are even weirder with post J: Even though D and its reply E
>    are at the same indentation level, J is suddenly indented more because of
>    an unrelated post I.
>    - Things go completely wrong once we hit the maximum depth, it's
>    impossible to have (or only to be seen as having?) "tangents" at all. The
>    reply box doesn't even show up under the post where I actually clicked
>    "Reply".
>
> All in all, I personally find the resulting structure to be very confusing
> as to what's actually replying to what since the same reply-structure might
> be displayed in different ways (depending on the order the replies were
> entered) and different reply-structures can give rise to the same
> display-structure.
>

(sorry for the self-reply)

Some of these might be solved by simply abandoning the idea that "first
reply = main thread, all others = tangent" in favor of displaying flat if
this post and its parent both have no "sibling" post.

That /would/ mean, though, that a single reply could result in a major
change to display-structure. For example, a reply-chain A→B→C→D→E→F→G would
be displayed flat, and then when someone posts B2 as a reply to A we'd have
A, then indented under it B and B2, then indented under B we'd have
C→D→E→F→G (which might still be displayed flat).

And there'd still be the case that a chain of replies and a single post
with multiple direct replies (none of which were replied to) could be
displayed the same in some cases, but that seems less likely to be
confusing to a reader.
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