Topic: Skipping to the next/previous post within a topic by the same author (SMF patch) - page 2. (Read 490 times)

Well, if you want up/down arrows, that's a different story!

Yeah, I get what you're saying. It's worth pointing out though, that frequently it does take you to the next page (although I'm sure you already knew that).

If I'm honest, horizontal arrows required less thinking, no CSS and less testing, so that's why I reached for them; not because I believe they make much more sense, or anything.

I trust your judgment, so if you feel strongly about it, I'll experiment with some vertical options (arrows will likely have to move to the top-right, where there's a little more breathing room).

It's on your keyboard: CTRL-HOME (CTRL-END works too).

I find the idea interesting, although I think that for a forum it is not a relevant option, because the idea is to follow a line of debate, and this tool would create a jump of intermediate information. But in some situations it could even be useful, despite not finding it relevant.

But I think it would be better if you have it in another place, for example next to the "qoute" button.
And the characters used are (or equivalent):
🡅 (U+1F845)
🡇 (U+1F847)

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Do you know another idea that would be useful to everyone on the forum (I think)?
It was to have a "Top Button" on every page, so that the person who has just read a topic, can go back to the top quickly without having to use the scroll.
Don't you think it would be useful?

This is exactly what I was going to say. Now it looks like it's going to the next page instead of the next post.

What I mean to say is of course: good work! I like those small improvements better than a big change with mythical new forum software.

I often use "CTRL-F username", and this would be easier. To search for a user's posts, I use "show All" to search more pages at once, but that's not possible for very large topics.

The user's post history includes other topics he posted in (try to find my last 4 posts in the WO-thread).

The buttons are very hard to see on mobile. I think you should at least use solid glyphs instead of outlined glyphs.

But I don't really see how this would be helpful, when author post history can already be accessed in chronological order.

I'm really not sure how this can be useful in a thread. When I read a thread, I don't or barely look at the poster/username. What I only check is the content but yes, after reading the post if I found it good quality, I'm definitely looking at the author. While in the case of shitpost, I just click on ignore (rarely use this though). If I read one single author's reply in a thread, it means I'm not in the discussion anymore.
Personally, I don't see it as very much useful according to my forum browsing habit but maybe for others, it can be very useful.

Hey, everybody!

Last month, I did the patch that added the "(OP)" thing to the forum (topic is here), this month I thought I'd try my luck a second time and see if I can get theymos to merge a slightly bigger patch (fingers crossed).

So, ajaxtempest was the member that suggested the OP identification thing, and later in that same thread they had a second idea:


The idea was merited (by vapourminer and LoyceV) and a few members made positive comments about it (LoyceV, Mr.right85, FatFork and nakamura12). After ajaxtempest noticed that their first idea actually got implemented, they came over to my thread to thank me (appreciated), cheekily point out that I hadn't properly listened to them (not so appreciated) and then reminded me about their second idea; unfortunately I didn't have good news for them:


After that, nobody else brought it up again, so I didn't think much more about the problem, but as time went on I was surprised to find that I kept wishing that the forum had that feature! Especially when you disagree with someone, it's only really possible to understand their position once you've read all of their posts in a given thread (and even then, maybe not). Trying to glean too much information from a single post is a recipe for miscommunication, but it's a real hassle at the moment (depending on the length of the thread) to go through each of someone's posts in a given topic. It's also very useful for skipping around megathreads (like WO) or just for when you're wondering if a specific poster had anything more to say in a specific thread.

So, once I saw the value in the feature, I started to think seriously about how to implement it without running into the problem that I had told ajaxtempest about: Right now, whenever a page of posts is returned by the server a small number of SQL queries are involved and there are no SQL queries that are issued per-post; that's good design and I didn't want to add code to SMF that would change that. After thinking about the problem for a bit, I realized that the database lookups don't actually have to be done during the page render, but can be postponed until the next/previous button is actually clicked on by hiding the SQL query behind an HTTP redirect. That way, this new feature adds zero additional database load when it's not being used.

Unfortunately, this "deferred" approach has a small usability flaw, and that is that because the information about the next/previous post is unavailable at render time, the buttons are not "smart", and they appear whether there is a post to skip to or not. In cases where you're already on the first post (no previous post to skip to) or already on the last post (no next post to skip to), clicking on the respective button will simply take you to where you already are. I don't think this is a big deal, and like I said above, I don't think that the additional database load it would take to avoid it can be justified, so my position is that I'd much rather have this feature with this small flaw than not have it at all. If it turns out to be a deal-breaker and theymos thinks that additional database load can be justified, then I'll rework the patch accordingly.

Anyway, now that I've bored you all to tears, here's what the final result looks like (buttons are next to "Report to moderator"):



If you hover over the buttons a tooltip appears that explains what they do, here's what each of them says:





Last time I did a patch, ajaxtempest wasn't entirely happy with my work:


So, this time around, in anticipation of them saying: "Thanks, but I wanted UP and DOWN arrows.", I'll just say: If you want things just so, then make them just so. [I added some context to this sentiment here]

I realize that people are likely to have many different opinions about where the buttons should go and what they should look like, and I experimented with lots of alternatives. The buttons are represented with Unicode symbols, and I've been careful to base my selection on characters that are likely to be widely available. Right now, the buttons are represented by ◁ and ▷ (U+25C1 and U+25B7). Another good choice might be the solid version of the same arrows: ◀ and ▶ (U+25C0 and U+25B6). Regarding positioning, I think the bottom-right is a good place for them to go (it's also quite a natural location for them to be in terms of source code, right before the signature gets rendered). I could also see them working in the top-right and maybe the bottom-left.

It's common for people to suggest that any given thing should "stand out" more, but this line of thinking tends to lead to noisy UIs with too many things competing for your visual attention, so I think the understated approach works fine for a feature that's intended to be used only once in a while.

Luckily, the way this patch is structured, messing with the "presentation layer" (piece 3, below) doesn't affect any of the logic, so theymos can pick whatever arrows he likes, and place them wherever he feels they should go.

Okay, so what follows is the actual patch (in three pieces).

I had some text, explaining what each piece does, but it felt silly to include, because theymos knows what's up and will be able to make sense of it all easily.

Piece 1


Piece 2


Piece 3