Reply To: New site is ok, new style is not
@Umar
The recent activity page is usable, but generally I have to load six or seven pages of it to see everything that has happened since I was last on. It’s an exhaustive list, showing every single reply, therefore touching each thread more than once, and includes notifications of friendships, etc.
Another thing about it that’s bad is if you click on a link from twenty hours ago, read the full post, then come back, you have to reload the six or seven pages again (it doesn’t remember that you were looking at two hundred items before you left it). I can work around that by remembering to open in new tabs (or I can read the reply on the page itself if it’s fairly short, but sometimes I want to be in the thread so I can remind myself of the context). If I ever forget to open in a new tab, I get the benefit of practicing my command of profanity (as in “Steve you fucking idiot, why the hell didn’t you open a new tab?”) as I hit “load more” eight times to get back to where I was.
The feature I was talking about was a list of topics that have had something happen in them. Each topic is listed once, no matter how many new replies it has received since the last time I came here. It’s not cluttered with friendship notices (which, while interesting, aren’t really “meaty” with interaction). I can click on a link to be taken to the first new reply in that topic, and simply read from there to the end. Because it is NOT threaded, there’s no need to be told of every single reply; I just need to know which one is the first one so I can start reading. And because I can read them all together, it’s easier to remember the context of each reply. (If it’s a one-liner on a topic that hasn’t seen action in a couple of days, I usually have no idea what it’s about unless I can scroll back and remind myself.) This sort of thing used to be very common on internet forums (and I still see it a lot), and I’ve never understood why it became unfashionable; it seems to have something to do with this weird “stream of collective consciousness” paradigm that Ning used (I guess it’s a Facebook/Twitter thing; I use neither. Such a format works pretty well, I think, when it’s one person’s online life being done, but not for a discussion forum that is about dozens of people.)
I recognize that if the replies are ever set up to be threaded, this sort of feature then suddenly makes no sense at all, because the thread won’t be automatically sorted by age of reply. But even there, a page that includes all the friendship notices and makes you “load more” multiple times is a bit unwieldy for finding new replies.
Anyhow, if you still don’t understand my description, it’s a failure on my part, and I can try to get some screen captures from other fora I am on to show you.
