launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Gavin Panella <gavin.panella@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 1 October 2010 09:49, Michael Nelson <michael.nelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
...
> 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?

I haven't done any measurements, but my feeling is that most bugs only
have a handful of comments. More than 20 comments and it's starting to
get unwieldy, more than 50 and it's silly. I don't think it's possible
to claw back sanity from such a bug by reordering comments.

I also personally find that oldest to newest is more natural. I find
newest to oldest disorientating and frustrating, but I have sensed in
the past that I'm towards the extreme end of the spectrum in that
regard.

> 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.

I like the approach Gmail takes in the message display, which is to
collapse/accordion old messages behind but slightly above the newest
message, to appear like a stack of paper. This stack can be expanded
to just the "top line" of each message, then the top lines can be
clicked to view the whole message. In a thread of 20 messages it's
easy to organise it such that, say, the most interesting few messages
are visible and are not drowned out by the others.

I'd like to see something like that for bug comments.

Gavin.