Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions

No indication of topic length in the ToC

6
Diego Moya (talkcontribs)

The new Table of Contents, combined with the lack of page structure brought by infinite scrolling, cause a loss of intuition about the relative length of discussions. Old talk pages give an spatial indication of the size of topics (using the number of sub-sections and the amount of scrolling in the scrollbar) which is now lost, making it hard to find the most lively topics - everything looks the same in the new ToC.

You could add some secondary notation to convey similar information. The most obvious is adding the number of replies to the right of the topic title at the ToC. There could also be some visual cues, giving more weight to longer threads - for example, adding color to topics with >5 comments, and bold typeface to topics with >20 comments or several indentation levels.

He7d3r (talkcontribs)

Or... the menu which currently shows "Recently active topics" could have more options, one of them to sort the topics by the number of replies, and other by the sum of the length (bytes) of the replies.

Diego Moya (talkcontribs)

In fact, I find it quite difficult to find the topic "New indentation and threading model" in the ToC every time i want to revisit it, despite I know it's one of the longest threads.

Topics with the most activity should be more salient; the current list of topics in the ToC makes all topics look exactly the same.

Quiddity (WMF) (talkcontribs)

I've copied the above to phab:T99785 ("Show richer info on Flow topics at the Table of Contents").

Diego Moya (talkcontribs)

Thanks, Quiddity. Is it best that we post these actionable suggestion at phab, or propose them here to discuss them first and wait for someone in the team to turn them into formal proposals?

Quiddity (WMF) (talkcontribs)

@Diego Moya: Either is ok, but I think it's best to discuss things here, for increased visibility and input from editors. Each platform has pros and cons, but Flow needs all the testing and activity (of real discussions) we can throw at it, to decide what features are most needed next, which is one of the other biggest reasons for continuing most of the discussion here :)

On-topic: I personally like both ideas. Another sorting option, and a graphical indicator in the ToC to indicate topic size, could both work well.

The sorting options would probably be more complicated, because we would have to decide what defaults to show, out of full/limited timespans, and full/limited other filtering options (such as Open/Resolved status). E.g. it wouldn't help on WP:VPT to just list all topics by a size metric.

The graphical indicator is worth brainstorming a little more... Personally, I think I'd want it to be non-alphanumerical, e.g. showing a ■ for every 10 posts in a topic, because the point is for an "at a glance" distinguishing feature, rather than having to read the difference between "10" and "70". Thoughts?

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