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

Reading conversations in H2G2 can be tortuously slow and frustrating.
You log in, go to "my space" and look at the summary of most recent replies, then wait for several seconds for the first conversation to load.
Nothing useful starts to render on the screen until whole page has been loaded, then you have to scroll to the end of the page - only to find a message that you've already read , or else a reply containing nothing but a silly smiley

I see this as a fundamental design flaw with teh implementation of H2G2, or possibly with the whole idea of using http for persisitent conversation. I'm not optimistic that it can easily solved, but the situation could be ameliorated by a couple of minor improvements.

1) Some way of denoting whether there are any "unread" messages in a conversation

2) A way of optionally switching off smileys and ignoring smiley-only posts.

Don't know about you, but I read the whole backlog just to get to the smiley only parts and understand them

Also, If you use the MP123456 page, It'll be much easier for you.

Yours,

Dancer

But what do you think of my feature suggestions?

I love the first one, and it will be amazing to have it, but it would be even more amazing if they write it, and even a squillion times more amazing then that if the servers will stand and not collaps while trying to actually do it.

The second ider isn't verry good in my oppinion, but I can see where youre comming from.

Oh, and it would never remove my postings as I sign even in my smiley only postings, so there's the 'Dancer' bit always...


Dancer

I think people do smilie-only posts as a way of 'bookmarking' so that you can see what you have and haven't read (of course, if more than one person in a thread does this the system kinda fails...)

I agree, smiley only posts drive me mad! If people haven't got anything to say, I wish they wouldn't post.

I think Frankie's reply contains a vital clue as to what is going wrong here.

After reading through the latest conversation, people have learned that it's best to post something or other at the end, because then they can see the magic words "no replies" and save themselves the bother of scrolling all the way through again if nothig has been added.

It's a bodge to get around the deficiencies in the design.

If they can't think of anything much to say they just post a couple of words or a smiley, just as long as it's something to reset the thread for them. Thus perpetuating the problem for everybody else.

It turns out that the two ponts I originally made - distinguishing unread messages and smiley-only posts are in fact connected by cause and effect in a sort of downward spiral.

It's nobody's fault, it's just a serious flaw in the functionality of this particular web board, possibly all web boards but I don't know enough others to be able to say.

One answer might be to hive off the conversation forums from the website, so that they can be accessed through parallel automated email groups.

The problem with doing that is that every site I've ever seen that somehow remembers which messages you've read will always have an irritating habit of getting it wrong. So I don't like it, and personally I find h2g2's method quite satisfactory. If it's going to be any better but without overloading the servers you'd probably have to farm it out to an external h2g2 viewer program on the host PC, and that'd be awful!

I don't tend to bookmark threads either, but that's probably because I almost always have something to say!

We tend to agree with MaW. Web boards tend not to store the concept of 'read' because, unlike in an application, you can't tell whether it's actually been read, only viewed as one of many on a web page.

Also, the 'Latest Posting' date is a pretty good way of telling whether anyone has replied since you last looked, as lots of people have an idea in their mind of when they last checked, and whether anyone has posted since then. A different solution therefore to denoting whether things are 'read' or not would be to enable users to click a button to set a time, and then only replies posted after that time would be shown. The button would effectively be a way to say 'I've read everything that I can' - not sure what the button would be called, though!

It would be simpler, optional, quicker to implement, and more suited. What do you think?

(As for the 'deficiencies in design' argument, we get over 3000 Postings per day, every day, and storing an individual 'read' flag for each of our 90,000+ Researchers isn't really feasible. Don't compare h2g2 with your individual email system, as that's not fair!)

so it's effectivley a post-it note or bookmark button but bookmark in the context of a bit of card in a book, not a thing on a computer?!?!?!?

so what would hitch hikers use instead of post-it notes? mmmmmmm

a small lump of green putty! obvious really.



another thing which would help with this problem would be if the info we wanted down loaded first. i.e. the conversations at the bottom of the user space are what most people check first. or the conversation box in a forum. the banners all load before the useful stuff and while i appreciate that this is probably because they are the easiest so therefore load quicker, still bugs me. we know what site we are on, where else could we talk to the management like this? what i want to see is if comeone has responded to my rant. not for all the stuff round the edge to download an then for the computer to crash, (common problem here) before i see the stuff i want.




oh, sorry, the point of my post: 'small lump of green putty' button to bookmark in a conversation.

FABT

>We tend to agree with MaW. Web boards tend not to store the concept >of 'read' because, unlike in an application, you can't tell whether >it's actually been read, only viewed as one of many on a web page.

The concept of a "page" of messages is clearly implemented as a technical consideration. It doesn't seem to me to serve any useful function to the reader, but it does cause no small inconvenience. It's just a clumsy technical compromise between amount of information served up and response time.

One alternative is to present a list of individual posts and authors, then I could see at a glance whether there are any new unread messages that I am interested in and go to them.

>Also, the 'Latest Posting' date is a pretty good way of telling
>whether anyone has replied since you last looked, as lots of people >have an idea in their mind of when they last checked, and whether
>anyone has posted since then. A different solution therefore to
>denoting whether things are 'read' or not would be to enable users
>to click a button to set a time, and then only replies posted after
> that time would be shown. The button would effectively be a way to >say 'I've read everything that I can' - not sure what the button
>would be called, though!

Excellent idea.

"Click here to set the current time as the time when you last caught up with all messages in your conversations. Next time you visit H2G2, only more recent posts will be displayed"

Difficult to find a catchy short name for it. Here are some suggestions:

an "all read" button.
up to date button
caught up button
cut-off time button


>It would be simpler, optional, quicker to implement, and more
>suited. What do you think?

I like it.

> the banners all load before the useful stuff

This annoys me too. Why can't the buttons and stuff be left alone at the top of the page instead of having to be reloaded and rendered for every single page?

On Opera you can set it to load the graphics from memory, which saves a lot of loading time. I'm not sure if it can be done on any other browser though.

Sometimes I read threads I don't want to post in, and if I read 4 pages, then come back and find another 4 have been posted, it can be difficult to remember what post I got to, and just as hard to find. So I love the idea of a 'I got to this bit' button. Nice and simply, it could be called 'bookmark'.

I think one of the reasons you don't see the page until everything loads is because of the use of tags to format text (every website designer does it). In IE (and maybe other browsers), the browser waits for everything in the table to load before rendering that part of the page... (that's what I read in one html tutorial anyway).

A 'save this point' button would be useful. There's a good implementation of this on a uk website called 'rideas' (obvious url), which my brother uses (quite an interesting system actually, it's a single messageboard which comes up in one page but you can filter by subject and mark where you've read up to). I think it's all done in a cookie...

[I'f the link gets moderated i'll add it to my space]

AndyR: "The concept of a "page" of messages is clearly implemented as a technical consideration. It doesn't seem to me to serve any useful function to the reader, but it does cause no small inconvenience. It's just a clumsy technical compromise between amount of information served up and response time."

It's not a "clumsy technical compromise", it's a solution to an unavoidable problem (but thanks for being so tactful, Andy! ).

When h2g2 first launched we displayed all Postings in a Conversation in one go, and it didn't take a great deal of activity before pages were (a) taking ages to pull from the database and (b) crashing browsers when they got there. Considering we now have a number of Conversations with more than 10,000 Postings in them, we have little choice but to split them up into chunks if we're to avoid a really slow service, and one that crashes browsers.

AndyR: "One alternative is to present a list of individual posts and authors, then I could see at a glance whether there are any new unread messages that I am interested in and go to them."

OK, but individual posts and authors from where? From all the Conversations and Forums you are subscribed to? But if you were subscribed to an active Conversation or Forum (like Ask h2g2) then you'd be presented with a *huge* list, especially if you went away for a week or so. Wouldn't this be far less friendly than the current system?

AndyR: "Why can't the buttons and stuff be left alone at the top of the page instead of having to be reloaded and rendered for every single page?"

If we used frames, then this would be cured, but it's against BBC policy to use frames, for very sound reasons. The current Forum frame view (designed before we joined the BBC) reloads all the frames as a hangover from the days when we wanted to increase the number of banner ads, and although it's on the to-do list to fix this, we recommend people use the single page view anyway.

Frames aside, the graphics are reloaded every time by *some* browsers because we use JavaScript rollovers, and some browsers (like IE) can't seem to get it into their heads that you don't need to reload the graphics every time. It sucks, but it's a consequence of the rollovers, and it's not like JavaScript rollovers are particularly antisocial or unusual...

The new skin we're working on doesn't use rollover for this very reason, and will be a lot faster.

"Click here to set the current time as the time when you last caught up with all messages in your conversations. Next time you visit H2G2, only more recent posts will be displayed"

Here's a quick exercise for the reader: Can anyone spot the fundamental flaw in implementing this feature as it is described here?

Readers might be interested to know that the database already holds a field called 'LastRead' which is intended to be used for precisely this purpose. So it's always been on the list.

But to be honest, even with this new feature, you'll *still* have people replying to threads with just a single smiley, because that's just what people do around here.

Web based forums will *always* be a compromise compared with using client-side newsreaders, for example. I think the h2g2 forums are better than most, but then I would say that, wouldn't I?

It'll set the time for ALL conversations, so we might miss some.

I like the idea of being able to hit a button in a conversation to mark where you're up to, like sticking a bookmark in a paper book. I don't think that's the same thing that Jim just mentioned as being a problem, is it? It's something entirely different, which would probably require a fair bit of effort to deal with.

Or is it?

> Here's a quick exercise for the reader: Can anyone spot the
> fundamental flaw in implementing this feature as it is described
> here?

This is meant to be "h2g2 Feedback" If you don't like a suggestion you don't have to implement it. If you want to explain why, then fine.

> I think the h2g2 forums are better than most, but then I would say
> that, wouldn't I?

It's a good idea to encourage people to make comments and suggestions which may make it even better. Try not to be too defensive, because that will put people off and encourage other posters to copy the style.