Need Help Testing a New Feature
I'm testing a feature in discussions that allows you to selectively hide pieces of the discussion. The idea is that this will make it easier to find the next item on the same level of a heavily-trafficked thread. You can view the feature in action here. Just click on any of the funky little icons to see how it works (and you can refresh the page to restore it to its original state).
Sadly, I think this is an IE-only feature (my first browser-dependant feature). I will hide these icons for browsers where it doesn't work. If you could try it and let me know if it works for you or not, and what browser/version/os you are using, that would be great! Just post responses here (also tell me if you think it's useful - I haven't convinced myself that it's genuinely useful as opposed to just being a novelty item).
I would be happy to implement this feature for Netscape if some Javascript expert would like to supply the code. I've convinced myself it can't be done for NN4.x, but I'm not sure about NN6.x.
Thanks!
Hey, Jim! Just my thoughts after experimenting a bit...it seems as if this "feature" is semi-complicating an already elegant interface. If I could understand better exactly what you personally hoped this would achieve it might help a little.
While fiddling I was having some trouble trying to figure out exactly what the box should be doing. I'd assumed at first kinda like the little boxes in windows explorer in the tree where you can collapse and expand but it didn't seem to work like that.
Right now it does the collapse but not the expand. I was mostly just playing when I happened across this idea, and I wasn't sure if it was genuinely useful or not, so I haven't taken is as far as it can go.
Conceptually, it might help to think of it as a "level-collapser" ("some think it's a matter collapser; a bomb capable of destroying pretty much everything in 13 seconds" or something like that). Think of all the root level posts as level 1, immediate responses to those as level 2, etc. So if you click on a level 4 post, it will collapse EVERYTHING on level 4 between the immediately preceding and immediately following level 3 posts. Where I would personally find this useful is if I were looking for the next level 3 post in a thread I'm interested in, but there's a slew of level 4, 5, etc. posts in between. With this feature, it's easy to nuke that chunk. So you can hide large chunks by using the feature on the "upper" levels (1, 2, etc.) or hide small chunks by clicking on the lowest levels and working your way up.
There are probably other features I should be working on, but this struck my fancy one late night. :-) I will concede that it might just be featuritis fodder, and you should tell me if so.
I think having a collapse option would be nice (or alternatively being able to switch between a thread view (the current) and a view by date, view by author), but it needs to be a bit more intuitive. with the windows collapse thing you can tell what section collapsed. i just couldn't figure out what this was doing because there was no way to see that something had disappeared..
I see your idea here but I dont see where it holds much of a purpose. I guess if someone is trying to find a reply they could remove old posts to make the screen clearer. Maybe its an alright idea.