h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Generally, the conversations BBS is nicely referenced. However, it would be nice to have some options as to the ordering of the posts - threaded or not, how many posts, that sort of thing. For a good example of how it can work, look at the comments at the end of the articles on slashdot dot org. I know its in Perl and this is in C++ but it is the idea I am thinking about.

It may be worth making the code for the site Open Source so that a larger developement team can be involved. I notice that there is already an open source project on Source Forge for a text editor for GuideML and a working one on Fresh Meat.

That's probably my project then... although I sort of ended up not using the SourceForge site due to problems negotiating the SSH session around the university firewall. It should be noted though that GuidePost is in no way associated with h2g2, and so is definitely not a precedent for the site's code to go Open.

Anyway, the Perl/C++ thing's no problem - they did this much in C++, there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to implement a preference for posts per page (which I would love to see...)

I know that h2g2 maintains a tree-based structure for conversations, but this isn't clear really, especially with single-page view. Now, I'd be quite happy not to have it at all, but I might recommend looking over at delphi.com's forums, as they have a note by each message saying which one it's replying to, like:

192.13 in reply to 192.4

Although they use thread numbers as well to make all post numbers unique. These numbers are linked to the appropriate posts, and it's quite handy really even though the forums are displayed in a flat view like our single-page view.

I don't actually bother with the tree structure at all. I know some people find it useful but I don't really see the point... if somebody does reply to a posting way back in the conversation then those who use the threading wotnot will be able to understand it but it's completely bemusing to everybody else (especially newbies). Call me boring but I think it's simpler and more understandable to have a linear conversation and *say* if you're replying to a posting which isn't the most recent. It's more intuitive

Ok, since you keep asking for it: Peregrin, you're boring!

I prefer to be able to backtrack, but even though the existing tree structure isn't very good, it's good enough for me. I certaintly don't want a tree that takes up more space on the page, than the existing one!

The point here is that many of these structures are useful, depending how you are reading any particular conversation. That is why slashdot and phpnuke (which we use on our site) allows the display options of Threaded, Nested or Flat. I find I change my settings depending on how I end up reading the conversation. This also means that if one comment starts wnadering off the point a bit (and others follow) it doesn't completely re-route the entire conversation - the original thought and conversation is still maintained.

The problem with threaded conversations is that it's very difficult to find new postings.

The presentation of our conversations has several things which should help you follow a conversation. Just below the 'Posted...' line there's a line which says 'This is a reply to _this posting_' which means you immediately have context for any conversation. There's also a link to the first reply at the bottom of the post. And if you're a real tree fan, you can turn on Expert mode and you get a little 'tree tool' which shows you the current post's position in the hierarchy and lets you jump immediately to the previous sibling, the next sibling, the parent and the first child. If you know how 'Child first next sibling' ordered trees work, you can easily navigate the whole conversation in thread order*.

However, we found in using the site ourselves, and with talking to other people who use it, the occasional advantages of thread ordering were vastly outweighed by the awkwardness of reading new posts in a long conversation. Old hands will no doubt remember the pain of scanning down the left-hand tree view, scrolling to the right, to try and spot the one new post in a thread of hundreds of other posts.

Not to mention that to properly present a threaded view, each time the forum is displayed we would have to load the whole conversation. For large conversations this quickly becomes very slow and a huge demand on server resources.

So, in summing up, the skin redesign is extremely unlikely to have any fundamental changes to the way conversations are presented. It's more focused on how best to present the information and navigation that already exists.
_________

* For those sad enough, here's how to do it:

Start at the first post. Then to find the next post in thread order:
- If there's a child, go to that post, otherwise
- If there's a next sibling, go to that post otherwise
- keep going back to the parent, and find a parent with a next sibling, and the sibling is the next post. If you get all the way up to the first post without finding a next sibling, you've finished.

My brain can't cope with all that expert stuff!

1) If the most recent posting is a multiple of 20, plus 1, then it's displayed all by itself, and you have to go back to see the postings before it. Can't it just show the last 10 or 20 (customizable?) postings relative to the last posting?

2) Also, when you post to a conversation you can only see the text of the last post (to which you are supposedly replying) - unless you open up a new window, which I don't like to do. As people often form their posting based on what has been said in several of the more recent postings, would it be possible to see more than just the last posting.

3) When people change their name, it affects everything they've ever posted. Which is a shame, because sometimes the bit in brackets after the name is witty and relevant to the time it was posted. Couldn't changes in name affect only postings after the change?

4) Now that you're with the BBC, couldn't you do something about all this rain we've been having?

You do not need to load the entire conversation. It is simply a question of an sql query.

For instance, rather than have a link to the child of the initial query, you could link to a query that displays all the children of that particular parent. As part of that link, it is easy to display the number of replies to that posting.

Also, you can make the query to the subject without having to post the content of the posts. So you could expand part or all of the conversation as required. This does not stop you posting over several pages to reduce your load, it is adding some calculations to the query of the number of items involved.

Certainly slashdot and thousands of others (including my own rather highly hit site) seem to have no problems with this principle and I have no reponse time problems from their servers which have a hit rate of around 5 million a week.

Not seeing the flow of a conversation I find very frustrating and it would be nice to have the option and have it clearly flagged at the top of a conversation.

"_this posting_" could be replaced by _posting_42_ - and at no cost since that information is already provided so that the linkes are set up correctly. That'd help.

It'd be nice to have some indication of which posts are new since last logging on h2g2... but I'm at a loss as to how to do this in an efficient manner...

A fairly standard form in most GPL forums to have a symbol which shows which posts you have not seen before. The code simply uses the information stored in your cookie to do this - it is a very simple process. Open Source boards which do this are Phorum, x-forum, UBB and many others.

yes Guru, that's simple - though I'd prefer to have server side stuff to cookies, becasue it makes stuff far more mobile. But I didn't think it would scale up well to a website the size of h2g2 - typically such sites have around 100 conversations, not 100,000 and counting...

Erm .. no. Typically such software is used on sites with 2 to 3 million hits a week and 300 or so postings to every single article. You have to remember that some of the busiest sites on the web are the Geek oriented sites and they all run on open source software.

Fair enough. Those forums with read/unread posts I've seen have been small, but I don't claim to have seen them all. If you say there are some with 2-3million hits/week, then I'll take your word for it.

Although it doesn't use most recent post type flagging, go to slashdot dot org and look through the comments to the articles (their variation on forums). Especially look at the options for displaying those comments - very useful!

Have fun!

"1) If the most recent posting is a multiple of 20, plus 1, then it's displayed all by itself, and you have to go back to see the postings before it. Can't it just show the last 10 or 20 (customizable?) postings relative to the last posting?"

Not really, because we cache the conversations in blocks. It would need two different views on the data, therefore two sets of cached information, to support both backward and forward viewing (after all, if we switched to showing the last 20, then the first post, by extension, would be the only one shown).

Don't forget that a lot of people come into conversations late, and will start reading from the beginning.

"2) Also, when you post to a conversation you can only see the text of the last post (to which you are supposedly replying) - unless you open up a new window, which I don't like to do. As people often form their posting based on what has been said in several of the more recent postings, would it be possible to see more than just the last posting."

No, because how would you decide how many to show? If you want to reference more than the current posting, open up a second window (which is easy to do in most browsers, and there's always a link from the 'Post to a conversation' page - shift click on that and you'll get another window up. Or do the shift-click on the Reply button to bring up the reply box in a separate window.

"3) When people change their name, it affects everything they've ever posted. Which is a shame, because sometimes the bit in brackets after the name is witty and relevant to the time it was posted. Couldn't changes in name affect only postings after the change?"

I did think about this, and in fact, the database structure for forum posts retains a field for username, so that it would retain the original username when posting, and there was a field when posting for you to put whatever username you wanted. However, we decided against that - displaying the user's current name is a small way of reinforcing accountability - so that in some small way people realise that take responsibility for what they post, not just now but in the future.

"4) Now that you're with the BBC, couldn't you do something about all this rain we've been having?"

Look out of your window. It's not raining now, is it?

Jim, on point (2), do you remember a suggestion I posted about a year ago...?

To recap., the idea was that when you clicked the "post" button, the page would redraw with the "post to a conversation" form inserted in-line with the page of replies you were looking at, in the right-hand frame. That way, you could scroll the page up and down for reference as you were typing... The original thread isn't back from moderation, and even if it was they'd have removed the URL to the photoshop mockup I did...

One point about conversations which I've always found irritating is the way that you lose the "The posting to which you are replying is from ..." text if you preview what you've been typing - any chance of leaving it visible after a preview?

I'm not sure if this is the right place to add it, but there are some improvements that could be done to the "subscribe to all new conversations" option. When you go to a page where you are subscribed, it could display "subscribe"/"unsubscribe" depending on if you are subscribed. In your preferences section, it could show you which pages you are subscribed to, again with the option to unubscribe like you have for individual forums.

The reason we don't show subscribe/unsubscribe on the page is to avoid yet another database lookup per-page, which allows us to cache much more of the page (and therefore lets the site run faster). Since you get the correct information when you actually visit the forum, at least the functionality exists at some point. The best we could do is reword the link, I think.

On the subject of the threaded posts, how about something similar to Lotus Notes Bulletin Board, admittedly there would be the need for the read/unread status but you could always have a button on the last post of a thread which you could click and it would change the status of all the parent posts to read. allowing you to dive in where you left off without having to post.

Mel

for the record, i like the conversations laid out the way they are, but i think peet has a great idea for the posting page.