LW Update 1/5/2018 – Comment Styling

post by Raemon · 2018-01-06T02:11:45.433Z · LW · GW · 7 comments

We've just pushed an update with a few stylistic tweaks, a few small bug fixes, and most notably, an overhaul on the comment styling.

The intent here was to make it easier to skim comments and keep track of branching threads. This is a bit of an experiment, and the current approach is that we're treating the comment section as conceptually different from the main post section.

This post has moderately deep comment trees that can showcase it in action.

Bugs that we could easily remember fixing:

7 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by Sniffnoy · 2018-01-07T08:12:06.335Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This is nice, thank you! I must still continue to complain about the pseudo-WYSIWYG comment box, that transforms Markdown into inline rich text. Just straight Markdown (ideally but not necessarily with a preview area) would be much more usable. Perhaps with the option of a proper WYSIWYG rich text editor -- which should, for instance, have the formatting buttons always displayed rather than only when highlighting something, and not transform entered text into formatting -- for those who want that.

comment by [deleted] · 2018-01-06T05:59:47.525Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks for updating the comment stylings! It's now much easier to read!

comment by Erfeyah · 2018-01-11T11:44:56.565Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks for adding clear outlines and alternate colors to the comments. This is so much better! A couple of other things that need to change in my opinion:

  • When composing a comment the background is the same color as the parent text making it difficult to know where the post we are replying to ends and our comment starts. Once it is posted it is all good.

  • When clicking on a notification the comment it displayed at the top of the page which is very convenient but its background color is the same as the rest of the page. This makes it look wrong as it conflicts with the title being before the main text. The right approach would be to make it clear that this is a type of alert by, for example, changing the background color.

  • I don't know if it is just me but I do not get spell checking when composing a post or comment.


Thanks for all the great work!

comment by Zvi · 2018-01-08T13:30:14.045Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

While I like the new comment styling boxes, I find the new font much worse than the old font, to the extent that it feels slightly painful to read in it. I'm sure I'll get used to it somewhat but I'd love to go back to the font we had, which I felt was pretty great.

Replies from: habryka4
↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2018-01-08T18:54:17.601Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

We very likely want to use a sans-serif font, since serifs are super hard to read at these small font sizes. I would be happy for alternate sans-serif recommendations. I like the current one, but am open to changing things.

comment by Chris_Leong · 2018-01-07T00:34:54.650Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Which one is magic sorting?

Replies from: Raemon
↑ comment by Raemon · 2018-01-07T02:22:57.050Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Right now, all the options on the front page are magic sorting (except Daily, which lists thing in chronological order). Magical sorting means that posts are filtered by by Karma and Recency. If you were posted within the past day or so, your post will appear near the top, after which it'll only stay near the top if it gets upvoted)

Reasons for this were:

  1. Based on what pages/settings were used most, it seemed like basically, people either wanted to make sure they saw everything in chronological order, or they just wanted the best content roughly sorted in by "what's new and seems good?" (i.e. magical sorting).
  2. In general, every bit of complexity in a UI has a cost. Each individual cost is small, but they add up.
  3. It seemed more important to give people control over what types of content they could see on the front page, than fine-tuned control over how to sort).