Trn or the equivalent. This would enable people to not see posts and comments they’ve already read unless they chose to, chose which other posters to see or not see, navigate comment trees.....
I suspect that if trn for the web were a Less Wrong project, it would also be useful publicity for the site, but this might be motivated thinking.
I have personal plans to develop my own sort of “trn for the web”; specifically, software which
takes as input: RSS/Atom feeds, possibly NNTP (Usenet) and email, as well as custom adapters for sources like LW which rely on threading but do not export it in common machine-readable form;
is used as a web-application but can be on one’s own computer or a multiuser server;
provides UI features: efficient stepping through messages, easy thread-tree navigation (probably very similar to trn), and remembering read messages.
However, I have no code as yet and no timeline; I might start working on it this summer or fall. I don’t imagine anyone wants to help out under the constraint that I make all the platform and design choices...
“New” is ill-defined. One of the glories of trn is that each registered person has a file which keeps track of which posts and comments they’ve seen.
On usenet, this was possible because each post was shown one at a time in ascii, which was fast enough to work even over a 56K connection.
I don’t think there was any way to make such a system to work on the web without JavaScript.
A scheme like yours could work with user-specified dates for collapsing everything prior and/or with collapsing prior to when the person signed out for those who don’t just leave tabs open. It isn’t nearly as elegant as having personal accounts that track everything a person has read [1], but might be better than what we’ve got now.
Something similar to Google Reader might be nice, with the ability to ‘star’ items, and track read, and mark unread. Now that I think of it, how about letting us make an rss feed out of a custom search and just view it in your favorite feed reader? That might be fairly simple.
edit: Perhaps there is a simple or low-resource web rss feed reader that we can integrate with our message inbox? This is an example, I’m sure there are others as well.
Trn or the equivalent. This would enable people to not see posts and comments they’ve already read unless they chose to, chose which other posters to see or not see, navigate comment trees.....
I suspect that if trn for the web were a Less Wrong project, it would also be useful publicity for the site, but this might be motivated thinking.
I have personal plans to develop my own sort of “trn for the web”; specifically, software which
takes as input: RSS/Atom feeds, possibly NNTP (Usenet) and email, as well as custom adapters for sources like LW which rely on threading but do not export it in common machine-readable form;
is used as a web-application but can be on one’s own computer or a multiuser server;
provides UI features: efficient stepping through messages, easy thread-tree navigation (probably very similar to trn), and remembering read messages.
However, I have no code as yet and no timeline; I might start working on it this summer or fall. I don’t imagine anyone wants to help out under the constraint that I make all the platform and design choices...
How about a setting to auto-collapse anything not new?
Edit—please disregard this post
“New” is ill-defined. One of the glories of trn is that each registered person has a file which keeps track of which posts and comments they’ve seen.
On usenet, this was possible because each post was shown one at a time in ascii, which was fast enough to work even over a 56K connection.
I don’t think there was any way to make such a system to work on the web without JavaScript.
A scheme like yours could work with user-specified dates for collapsing everything prior and/or with collapsing prior to when the person signed out for those who don’t just leave tabs open. It isn’t nearly as elegant as having personal accounts that track everything a person has read [1], but might be better than what we’ve got now.
[1] trn included a “set unread” option.
It is ill-defined, yes. Hm...
Something similar to Google Reader might be nice, with the ability to ‘star’ items, and track read, and mark unread. Now that I think of it, how about letting us make an rss feed out of a custom search and just view it in your favorite feed reader? That might be fairly simple.
edit: Perhaps there is a simple or low-resource web rss feed reader that we can integrate with our message inbox? This is an example, I’m sure there are others as well.
Edit—please disregard this post