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FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations

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Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations

#3

Post by taliesinb »

Funny story, I had almost exactly the same idea in 2013 and prototyped it in Mathematica (probably a lot of people have had this idea). Here's a screenshot of some random thread that I happened to visualize (comments were visible as tooltips in my rough and ready implementation): https://imgur.com/a/9xfw6cA (color represents common authorship, size is comment length). I didn't have the Javascript chops to do anything usable, let alone as polished as the linked Chrome plugin; kudos to the author!

Another thing I was doing at the time was visualizing Twitter and Facebook friend graphs, and the first insight there was to deliberately drop the 'ego' node, as it destroys any hope of effectively showing community structure of the friends themselves (it also carries no extra information as everyone is necessarily connected to the ego).

So perhaps a similar thing would be effective for threaded conversations: if you drop the root node, disconnected discussions will become separate trees in the visualization, which will help with efficient use of space, and the tail of singleton comments that no one replied to will become isolated disks that can space-fill the background. Switching to an actual rectangular tree layout as I used in my prototype will also help in that one consistent direction (down) represents nested depth.

Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations

#4

Post by chrisweekly »

ventedfins wrote: post #2

Hi hackernews! I'm the author of this site/chrome extension/app. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have/field any comments

Thanks for sharing. I'd suggest adding a bit of descriptive prose / "about" / readme / FAQ on the linked page. Also, its layout is suboptimal on mobile safari.

Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations

#5

Post by iandanforth »

ventedfins wrote: post #2

Hi hackernews! I'm the author of this site/chrome extension/app. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have/field any comments

I like being able to browse answers by the OP. Using your tool I found the OP name in the Top Poster's section and clicked that name.

I then wanted to see the context for a specific comment so I clicked on it. Great that worked!

Then I wanted to go back to where I was in the list of comments by the OP. I clicked the back button ... that didn't work.

Ideally either the back button would work (each state has an equivalent URL) or the UI provides a way to return to the last state.

Thanks for the interesting tool!

Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations

#6

Post by JohnFen »

That page has a major layout issue for me: it appears to have a fixed height with no vertical scrollbar, so the bottom portion of the page is completely inaccessible to me even if I maximize the window.

Is that part of what you're trying to test, or is it just an unimportant artifact of the test page?

Also, I'm not actually on board with the visualization -- it just makes everything more confusing and harder to follow. But that might be my personal idiocy.

Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations

#7

Post by jolmg »

JohnFen wrote: post #6

That page has a major layout issue for me: it appears to have a fixed height with no vertical scrollbar, so the bottom portion of the page is completely inaccessible to me even if I maximize the window. Is that part of what you're trying to test, or is it just an unimportant artifact of the test page? Also, I'm not actually on board with the visualization -- it just makes everything more confusing and harder to follo…

It also happens to me. The graph resizes and reorganizes as the window size is adjusted, but it always shrinks less than it should. There's always a part of the graph that goes beyond the bottom of the window.

Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations

#8

Post by theoh »

ventedfins wrote: post #2

Hi hackernews! I'm the author of this site/chrome extension/app. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have/field any comments

When I started reading Usenet in the 90s, trn (threaded read news) was the state of the art in news readers.

It might be worth mining the trn user interface for ideas.

The author tried to write a major new version (4) in the late 90s, but from what I could see of the development process (being on a mailing list), the codebase became unmanageable and there were lots of bugs that proved impossible to catch. Usenet was on its last legs by that stage anyway. So that's a cautionary tale: make sure the specification and basic architecture remains clear and clean. (I'm not sure how many of the bugs back then were related to managing ncurses and other fiddly issues that won't arise in the architecture of a web app.)

Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations

#9

Post by JohnFen »

chrisweekly wrote: post #4
ventedfins wrote: post #2

Hi hackernews! I'm the author of this site/chrome extension/app. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have/field any comments

Thanks for sharing. I'd suggest adding a bit of descriptive prose / "about" / readme / FAQ on the linked page. Also, its layout is suboptimal on mobile safari.

> I'd suggest adding a bit of descriptive prose / "about" / readme / FAQ on the linked page.

I think this would be essential. I've been clicking around on it, and it's not entirely clear to me how to work it. I may be an idiot, but I'd really love some instructions.

EDIT: I just now managed to see the "wait I'm lost" link toward the bottom. It took some doing (that's part of the page that gets clipped). I'm now following the walkthrough -- perhaps that will clarify things for me.

Edit edit: OK, I think I have a basic understanding of what's up. It's overly complex for my needs, though -- I think I prefer the normal comment threads.

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