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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   7800 thread views

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Hmm. My gut feeling is that it should update if you're not logged in, just for the sake of people who are logged-out-browsing. But maybe it shouldn't update the same stuff; that is, each account, including "not logged in", should have its own independent status for what's new.

Does that make sense?

At this point, it's seemed to behave in inconsistent ways, and I no longer have any useful idea about what's going on. All I can say is that I have the problem.

Actually I'm not sure this is the problem, unless something changed. I had all cookies set to session cookies and the problem only happens when I completely exit the browser. Otherwise the read comments are updated when you enter a thread. Just going to the site when logging in doesn't enter a thread, so it shouldn't be updating any read comment dates, and so it shouldn't be the cause of my problem.

(If you store the information on the server, so people can browse from a different location and still know which comments are new, it would incidentally solve this problem too.)

If I'm not logged in, it doesn't show that there's anything new at all, it just prevents it from showing anything new when I do log in.

Is it possible (as a low-priority feature request) to expose the "last viewed timestamp" in a (editable) box on the header?

This would allow one to get around any remaining janky behaviour as to when that updates, and also would have the benefit of allowing users to highlight recent comments (for any given personal definition of 'recent') regardless of viewing/browser history.

Probably, yeah. This could be done entirely clientside, I believe - all you really need is a Javascript snippet, run via something like Tampermonkey.

I don't think this is the kind of thing I'm spending developer time on right now, though if someone really wants to put something together we might be able to find a spot for it.

Yeah it's definitely on the 'nice to have' -- Tampermonkey is a good suggestion, I may dive in and see if I can get some idea of feasibility that way.

The font changes etc. continue to look really good -- it seems like you've increased the chunk size of comments loaded as well? I'm getting more than previously anyways, which is working well performance-wise AFAICT.

it seems like you've increased the chunk size of comments loaded as well?

Yep, went from 50 comments per page to 200 comments per page :)

This did increase page load time painfully, though - it's tolerable for now but it's not going higher until we have better setups for this.

Huh, is that "observed client-side" or some test dealie?

It's not noticeably longer for me (like, I literally didn't notice for a while because it was a lot closer to the reddit experience) and anyways 'one longer pageload' would be better than 'four slightly shorter pageloads'!

Transition is getting pretty smooth (if not better than Reddit in some ways) -- excellent work man!

You actually can observe it client-side; click the Culture War Roundup comment page and count how long it takes to display the page. It's going to be at least two seconds because that's how long it takes the server to chug through the processing. Double that number again and it'll probably go up to 4-5 seconds, and there's a surprisingly low limit on how long people will comfortably wait for a page to display.

We've got some ideas on how to fix this, but they join a queue of other things we need to deal with.

Transition is getting pretty smooth (if not better than Reddit in some ways) -- excellent work man!

Thanks! I'm pretty happy with it - the shortest-term threats are, somehow, over with.

Now we just gotta deal with the longer-term problems. :V

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