Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions

Clicking title to collapse

11
Erik Moeller (WMF) (talkcontribs)

In the default-state, all topics are expanded, and I can click a title to collapse a topic.

It's not clear to me why I'd ever want to collapse an individual topic. Is there a real use case for this?

There is a point here about consistency, I guess, since we can switch all topics to being collapsed by default. I'm skeptical that this is useful, and suspect a true TOC of some kind would be more valuable than something I have to use to switch back and forth.

As for clicking the title, I would suggest quicker access to editing titles, perhaps by double-clicking them.

Curious if other people find the current behavior useful as-is.

Gryllida (talkcontribs)

Hi Erik, In this case visiting the mobile website might be worthwhile. In it, article sections content visibility is toggled when you click them. To my knowledge, they are trying to save the bandwidth and space. Unfortunately I get rid of this behaviour there (as well as at Flow talk pages) by disabling JavaScript in the browser entirely. This is probably inconsiderate of me given that I'm not advocating proper interface for the rest of the readers and contributors.

Diego Moya (talkcontribs)

I agree it's not much useful in its current form, but it could be a way to allow partial access to just some relevant content in the thread.

The collapse/reveal behavior would be useful for a "recent updates/diff" view, where each topic were collapsed except for the few comments posted or changed since your last visit (plus the single comment above each new one of them, shown for context, as we have in the current diff views).

When accessing such "changelog" view, it would be useful to have a click on the header to expand all comments and allowing the user to revise the full thread, after having read just what was new.

Klipe (talkcontribs)

I do find this proposal of having the collapsed mode show just the diffs in a changelog view very interesting (although I still don't like the "click on header" interface, as explained below).

Klipe (talkcontribs)

I do collapse individual topics from time to time. I do it for long ones in the default "all topics expanded" mode, or for any topics I just read when looking at the board in "all topics collapsed" mode.

However, I don't like the "click on the title to collapse" interface. In particular, I find it very much annoying that topics get collapsed every time I try to select (part of) their title for copy/pasting. I would prefer a small active zone (e.g. a visual indication of the collapsed/expanded state to the left of the title, in the grey title box) on which to click to change the state, while the title itself can be selected normally.

This said, collapsing individual topics may become less useful once we'll have a real ToC...

In case we want a quick access to "edit title", then again (double) clicking on it would interfere with standard text selection functionality (double click typically selects a whole word). More fundamentally, I think that such a quick access would be marginally useful and bring more confusion. To me, "edit title" is a comparatively seldom action and may therefore stay in the "other actions" menu behind the dots triplet icon. If this action becomes accessible with just one (double) click, then new/occasional users may suddenly find themselves in an "edit title" mode without knowing how they went there. They may even not realise what they are doing and just start typing something!

In any case, thanks for having brought this topic forward. I'm curious to read other's opinions on the matter.

Diego Moya (talkcontribs)

Thinking more about it I agree that the function has uses. For example on mobile there won't be enough space for a ToC on the side, so it would be useful there to have the whole board collapsed and working as its own index. Article pages on the mobile interface work that way, and it's a reasonable approach.

And I concur that linking the action to a click on the title box seems weird, like it would be having double click to edit; all interactive actions should be tied to a button or link working as an affordance to suggest that the action is possible, and giving a hint as to what is their effect.

Double click in particular is a gesture with accessibility problems, and it can always be replaced by two successive single clicks - one to focus and select the item, and a second click on the focused item to trigger the action. A fast "click to edit" command could work that way.

Hhhippo (talkcontribs)

I use it once in a while, too, as a way for marking a thread as read, but I agree (and I'm sure I nagged about that before) that clicking something that doesn't look like a link or button is not intuitive. My suggestion would be to implement this ;-) and then apply a similar approach to the topic title: Start the bottom line in the title box with the collapse/expand triangle icon, followed by n comments with the same mouse function. After that come the Reply link and the timestamp.

I also think that editing the title is rare, and can stay in the "..." menu. Assigning a double click on the title to this function would not be very discoverable. What one could maybe consider is showing the "..." menu also for a right-click on the title, if we can (and want to) steal that mouse event from the browser.

Using collapsing to guide the reader to new activity would be a nice feature. I've been meaning to include that in more detail in my suggestions regarding Partial collapsing and monitoring activity. Maybe I find the time...

Klipe (talkcontribs)

Your proposal around compact nesting is really worth reading. That's a very interesting approach to nesting and collapsing, which would indeed serve various use cases better than the current implementation. There may be drawbacks... but I still haven't found any :-)

Hhhippo (talkcontribs)

I got notified about the creation of this topic by Echo, but it didn't show up in my watchlist, even though I'm watching the board. Is that a known bug?

Gryllida (talkcontribs)

They might have been playing with this given that people are complaining that they see things in Echo first and then in Watchlist again. Opening a new topic about this might be worthwhile.

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