Topic on Talk:Flow Portal/Archive2

It looks like this more replaces existing talk pages than building on them, which I don't like. It seems as though it ought to be simple enough to build the GUI into a wikitext-based page that we experienced users could edit more comfortably, but evidently it is not.

Will wikitext still work in replies, or will we have to learn a completely different markup to use on talk pages? Is this still italic? TortoiseWrath (talk) 00:42, 5 May 2013 (UTC)

Oh crap, it's not necessary to sign my post with four tildes, it says. *hyperventilating*

...reverse chronological order? Why? I took to Echo from the first minute; this will take a while.

It's reverse chronological order by "last update" time. So the "hot" conversations float to the top. This is actually more natural than having to scroll to the bottom to see a conversation that you're involved in.

There's another reason why this is so: Flow boards and feeds are infinite scrolling. There is no pagination. So if we do a "most recent at the bottom", you'll never see it.

They use infinite scrolling? That is an interesting design decision. What was the basis?

Auto-archiving of topics and the ability to localize searches within the corpus of a single board, plus the expected behavior of re-structuring the topic stack based on last-modified timestamps. These things lend themselves to infinite scrolling architectures.

This is actually a very old decision.

But then you have to scroll to the bottom of that conversation (but not too far, or else then you’re in the middle of the next conversation).

…which is more or less completely mitigated by auto-collapsing already-read posts, I see now that I’ve looked at the prototype. So unless there’s an option to never do that, I guess my point is invalid.

Note that we are using LiquidThreads here, not Flow.

Oh, are you talking about the prototype? Sorry.