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Comments on Is there a consensus on comment layouts for the MVP and beyond?
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Is there a consensus on comment layouts for the MVP and beyond?
I've been looking around Codidact sites, wiki, repos and mission, to be able to determine if this is even a discussable or interesting topic at all. I was about to drop any ideas to ask this question, until I found the following in the wiki's Codidact Vision (emphasis mine):
Our big ideas for the platform include:
[...]
A way to have the discussions that are sometimes necessary to improve a question or answer without getting in the way of people just looking for answers.
In the MVP spec more was elicited about individual aspects of comments, and how they'd be grouped. But even after some reading, I'm left with one essential question about Codidact's preferred discussion layout:
Is the current comment positioning¹ up for discussion (or has it been)? Searching for comment here and in the old forum didn't point me to a definitive venue.
¹ Current one being, basically, always right below the parent question/answer.
Other possibilities
Based on the above wiki excerpt and supposing this is an appropriate place to start this discussion, I've become acquainted to what's seen in TopAnswers: comments lay to the side of answers/questions, in a dedicated discussion panel.
This is optimal for setting both apart, and from what I've seen it encourages open and thorough discussions. Essentially, it's a chat bound to the title of a question, as discussed in this forum post, but if that kind of interaction isn't a main goal of Codidact, I can still see "lateral discussion panels" beside every question and answer as a good alternative to accommodate both answer-focused and discussion-focused workflows.
Some obvious caveats I think this approach has:
- The openness of chats. Defining the boundary between "comments in this question chat are on-topic enough to belong here" and "comments in this question chat are tending more to the off-topic end and the discussion needs to be halted/moved to a broader chat room". Not just defining those boundaries, but implementing a community-centered approach to these decisions. Maybe voting?
- Mobile accessibility. Lateral space is a limited resource in cellphones. TopAnswers circumvents this by having an upper "toggle/switch to chat" button. If Codidact decides to default to this layout (or enable it in communities), the toggle could be made more obvious in the UI, so even beginners restrained by mobile browsers could easily notice the presence/possibility of a discussion anywhere. Maybe a highlighted comment button with a "There are X comments in this question. Click here to view" type of label.
Thank you for raising this question. We've been a little vague in our plans for comments, aside from (irony alert) comm …
4y ago
We have some early, crude wireframes showing our ideas on comment threading: collapsed threads under a post, expanded th …
4y ago
Comments and chat serve two very different purposes. Comments should only be for communicating with the author about mo …
4y ago
Post
Comments and chat serve two very different purposes. Comments should only be for communicating with the author about modifications to the post. These should not be conversations or chit-chat. In a lot of situations, allowing such chit-chat would seriously degrade what people come to the site for.
Chat, on the other hand, is for side conversations and intended to include back and forth, perhaps between multiple users. That has it's place, but I would certainly NOT want to see it on a Q&A page. Let's keep those clean.
Chat is very messy and noisy by its nature. That's fine when you go to a particular page just for that. But, that place should not be a Q&A page.
In all the years I was on SE, I looked at chat maybe a dozen times at most. Each time I remember thinking "Yuk, what a mess" and got out of there fast. I realize some people are into that, but there are also plenty of people like me who are here because it's NOT a kaffeeklatsch.
The solution is to keep Q&A and chat solidly separated. Off to the side is not separate enough, not to mention visually cluttered regardless of what's over there.
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