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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
3 answers
You are accessing this answer with a direct link, so it's being shown above all other answers regardless of its score. You can return to the normal view.
We have some early, crude wireframes showing our ideas on comment threading: collapsed threads under a post, expanded thread. Be sure to turn on the comments view. It looks like you need a Figma account to see comments (free, but it's still one more account to manage), so I've added some screenshots below. If any of our more Figma-savvy team members can improve on what I've done here, please feel free to edit.
You can see all of our wireframes in this GitHub project. Plans can evolve after the initial sketches are done; don't take anything here as committed, but these are our working ideas.
Thank you for raising this question. We've been a little vague in our plans for comments, aside from (irony alert) comment threads in some Figma wireframes that aren't the most visible.
Speaking for myself and not for the team:
I use TopAnswers too, and the sidebar chat works ok on a desktop computer with a larger viewport, but the experience on a phone or even a tablet is kind of limited. Even on my desktop, with the bit of font zoom that my eyes require, it makes for some pretty short, choppy lines in messages. Just as text that is too wide is hard to read, so is text that is too narrow. When we make layout choices we have to consider the many configurations our users might bring to our site. As you said, TopAnswers makes it a toggle on a phone; view chat or the question/question list. Whatever we do for comments (or eventually chat), it'll need to work for both small and large windows.
Part of the idea behind threaded comments -- just one level of threading, not the mess you get on some sites that indent each level and then you're 20 levels deep and it's hard to read -- is that there will be a place for the mix of feedback, back-and-forth debugging/clarifications, and tangents that sometimes happen. And this place will be there, but not invasive -- usually collapsed, and you can decide which threads to expand. On SE some communities shut down all comments that aren't immediately about the post they're attached to, while other communities are more liberal. We're not making a decree about this; we want to handle the latter gracefully, because it's going to happen sometimes.
We do need a place for casual chat; for all that I find most chat interfaces frustrating in some way or other, I've found that having chat is an important tool for community-building. The people who work together to build our communities need to be able to interact with and get to know each other. Sometimes that'll be general chat, maybe not even about the site's topic, and sometimes it'll be about specific posts.
I have been envisioning (Art will shoot me now :-) ) a "chat" pseudo-category, alongside Q&A and a site's blog and contests and whatever else. Behind there would be not the kinds of posts you see on the rest of the site but, rather, something more free-form. There could be different rooms or channels. And, if we did something like that, then anybody (with some privilege TBD) could also create a chat channel/room/whatever for a specific question or article, with linking between the two.
But chat is a large project, and strictly speaking we don't need integrated chat immediately because we do have the Discord server. Using the Discord server has all of the same problems of a different thing, over there that SE chat has -- different login, different interface, weak connections... But we have it, and we don't yet have threaded comments and new privileges and several other things we know are critical, and chat is a large project (can we integrate something instead?), so a chat system will have to wait.
Which brings us back to comments. I'm hoping that threading will help make them usable without adding to the scrolling one must do to get to the answers, and I anticipate that (on sites that don't shut it down) there will be some discussions in some of those collapsed threads and that'll be ok. In terms of layout, I've been assuming they'll go below the post, which will work at any viewport size; there's an argument to be made for them to be placed to the side on larger viewports, so I'll ask our design folks about that. (They know way more about the ins and outs of responsive design than I do.)
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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