launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Michael Nelson <michael.nelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

There are some situations where we are using (or wanting to use)
comments in Launchpad for a log of activity (like an activity stream),
or a log of changes. In these situations Henning, Curtis and I think
that ordering from newest to oldest would be more helpful to see.

Here's a 1 minute demo of an interaction where I've done this:

http://people.canonical.com/~michaeln/tmp/649559-blacklisting-with-comments.ogv

but Henning and Curtis point out correctly in the UI review [1] that
although newest-oldest makes sense here, the comments appear just like
normal comments on bugs/ and so it would be confusing (so I've
reverted the order of the comments in that branch now). IMO we still
do want oldest-newest comments in other situations - merge proposals
being a good example where it is a story that begins with the
description and flows through with comments, new revisions etc. Bugs
are another discussion though (hrm, stack-overflow-like most useful
comments at the top ;) ).

So the questions are:

1) Do other people also share the view that users will benefit from
newest-oldest comments/activity logs in some situations? If so, what
are the other situations? If not, why not?

2) How could they be visually distinctive from the normal comments (or
more generally, how can we ensure the two different orderings don't
confuse people)? Or should we restrict newest-oldest ordering to
specific functionality (ie. don't use it for anything that is like a
comment, but it's ok for an activity stream for a person/pillar.

Cheers,
Michael

[1] https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~michael.nelson/launchpad/649559-ajax-comment-on-dsdiff-2/+merge/37114