The widget shows items under “comment score below threshold” threads, but clicking on those comments in the widget panel doesn’t do anything. Ideal behavior would be to open the “comment score below threshold” JavaScript link when clicking the item, possibly also to use a different rendering color for these items in the widget to go along with the bad thread filtering spirit and give the user an opportunity to skip them without reading.
This whole project is making me think that websites like LW with moderately complex use patterns could just be database APIs on the server side and have the client side HTML rendering and all made entirely in JavaScript so that people could do drastic usability changes by just changing the default frontend source. Of course that would also make hostile botting much easier.
Good catch. Don’t think I’m going to change the behavior, as there’s complex cases where there’s no obvious behavior: suppose you have a highly upvoted comment, whose parent and grandparent are both below the threshold. Do you color it in the widget differently from its parents? Do you expand both its parent and grandparent when it’s clicked on, in order that it be on the page and thus scrollable to? Do you mark its parent somehow so the reader knows that comment wouldn’t normally have been displayed?
So I think I’m OK with clicking on a comment which is hidden doing nothing. It’s maybe worth greying out such comments in the list, so as not to confuse people when nothing happens, but I feel like this mostly just ends up highlighting them, so I’m not going to put that in the main script. If you want that feature, though, I pushed it to an alternative branch on the github repo, and you can find it here. Comments will remain greyed even if you’ve un-hidden their parents, but will become scrollable to.
The widget shows items under “comment score below threshold” threads, but clicking on those comments in the widget panel doesn’t do anything. Ideal behavior would be to open the “comment score below threshold” JavaScript link when clicking the item, possibly also to use a different rendering color for these items in the widget to go along with the bad thread filtering spirit and give the user an opportunity to skip them without reading.
This whole project is making me think that websites like LW with moderately complex use patterns could just be database APIs on the server side and have the client side HTML rendering and all made entirely in JavaScript so that people could do drastic usability changes by just changing the default frontend source. Of course that would also make hostile botting much easier.
Good catch. Don’t think I’m going to change the behavior, as there’s complex cases where there’s no obvious behavior: suppose you have a highly upvoted comment, whose parent and grandparent are both below the threshold. Do you color it in the widget differently from its parents? Do you expand both its parent and grandparent when it’s clicked on, in order that it be on the page and thus scrollable to? Do you mark its parent somehow so the reader knows that comment wouldn’t normally have been displayed?
So I think I’m OK with clicking on a comment which is hidden doing nothing. It’s maybe worth greying out such comments in the list, so as not to confuse people when nothing happens, but I feel like this mostly just ends up highlighting them, so I’m not going to put that in the main script. If you want that feature, though, I pushed it to an alternative branch on the github repo, and you can find it here. Comments will remain greyed even if you’ve un-hidden their parents, but will become scrollable to.