I do this because there’s no way to request posts and comments sorted together chronologically with GraphQL. However, if you click the posts or comments tab, the pagination will work correctly for any number of pages.
Indeed, it’s working properly with the show=posts and show=comments URL parameters, and no content seems to be lost. Great news, but that was definitely non-obvious—thanks! (I’d naïvely assumed that if the individual chronological listings were available, that the combined listing would be built by searching for offset_posts and offset_comments such that offset_posts + offset_comments = offset, and the timestamps for the post at offset_posts and comment at offset_comments are as close as possible. Shouldn’t require more than log(N) reqs in the worst case—far less than that typically. But perhaps there’s some snag that makes this approach unworkable!)
Perhaps a notice should be added to the “combined” user pages to the effect that the ‘Posts’ and ‘Comments’ options may be preferable for some uses.
ETA: There seems to be some remaining edge cases around comments on deleted posts, or something like that. In LW1, you get a permlink to the comment from the user page, and can then browse the individual thread. Greater Wrong does not have a notion of viewing a single thread or anything similar, so it tries to get data about the post as a whole, fails, and clicking on the link to the post returns an error page. I have not investigated what LW2 does. This is a very minor issue overall of course. I mention it mostly because I’m wondering how it impacts preservation of e.g. the original discussions about the LW basilisk, which were on a now-deleted page. (Yes, some comments—including e.g. Eliezer’s initial reaction—were totally deleted, but many others were not! And yes, to be quite explicit about it, there are many popular misconceptions about the basilisk, and having these comments preserved is perhaps the one really effective way of addressing them. There was a very clear perception—from people who had actually read the original post! - of how silly it was for Roko to even come up with such an unlikely and contrived scenario, and then bring it up as something that might happen. Roko subsequently wiped his whole presence off the site—posts, comments and all; that he was such a major contributor in the early days is part of why this issue of accessing “comments to something that was deleted” comes up more often than people might expect otherwise!)
I do this because there’s no way to request posts and comments sorted together chronologically with GraphQL. However, if you click the posts or comments tab, the pagination will work correctly for any number of pages.
Indeed, it’s working properly with the
show=postsandshow=commentsURL parameters, and no content seems to be lost. Great news, but that was definitely non-obvious—thanks! (I’d naïvely assumed that if the individual chronological listings were available, that the combined listing would be built by searching for offset_posts and offset_comments such that offset_posts + offset_comments = offset, and the timestamps for the post at offset_posts and comment at offset_comments are as close as possible. Shouldn’t require more than log(N) reqs in the worst case—far less than that typically. But perhaps there’s some snag that makes this approach unworkable!)Perhaps a notice should be added to the “combined” user pages to the effect that the ‘Posts’ and ‘Comments’ options may be preferable for some uses.
ETA: There seems to be some remaining edge cases around comments on deleted posts, or something like that. In LW1, you get a permlink to the comment from the user page, and can then browse the individual thread. Greater Wrong does not have a notion of viewing a single thread or anything similar, so it tries to get data about the post as a whole, fails, and clicking on the link to the post returns an error page. I have not investigated what LW2 does. This is a very minor issue overall of course. I mention it mostly because I’m wondering how it impacts preservation of e.g. the original discussions about the LW basilisk, which were on a now-deleted page.
(Yes, some comments—including e.g. Eliezer’s initial reaction—were totally deleted, but many others were not! And yes, to be quite explicit about it, there are many popular misconceptions about the basilisk, and having these comments preserved is perhaps the one really effective way of addressing them. There was a very clear perception—from people who had actually read the original post! - of how silly it was for Roko to even come up with such an unlikely and contrived scenario, and then bring it up as something that might happen. Roko subsequently wiped his whole presence off the site—posts, comments and all; that he was such a major contributor in the early days is part of why this issue of accessing “comments to something that was deleted” comes up more often than people might expect otherwise!)
GreaterWrong will now attempt to load the comments even when the post fails to load; the comments you mentioned should now be visible here.
And yeah, you’re right that the user page loading could be handled better.