For bugs with >100 comments, instead of displaying first 80 comments, display the first 40 and last 40

[Bryce Harrington]

[Problem]
Please change the 80-comment limit to display the *last* 80 comments instead of the *first* 80.

[Discussion]
I've got several quite popular bugs with >100 comments, and have run across the new 80-comment limit feature. For example, bug #252094, with 264 comments.

As a general rule, I care more about the last few dozen or so new comments to the bugs than I do about the first 80. So I almost always end up clicking on the "view all NNN comments" link. So ironically, now I'm making two page loads (one for 80 comments, one with NNN comments) where I made only one before. Also, having to scroll the length of the page and click a second link makes the workflow to review new comments take longer than it did before.

All of this could be solved more efficiently by just changing it to display the last 80 comments (even just the last 25 would be sufficient) rather than the first.

An alternate idea would be to raise the threshold to, say, 400. I don't think I have any bugs with more than that many comments. Even so, I feel that displaying the last 80 comments would be a superior solution, at least in my case.

(As a total aside, you may be wondering why I have a bug with 264 comments open. Usually I close out bugs if they get more then 50 comments; usually that means they've ceased to be useful as bug reports. But sometimes people just need a place to discuss something and for some reason prefer doing it in a bug tracker rather than in a forum. When I close one of those kinds of bugs, within a few months there is yet another. The prior incarnation of 252094 was 177492, for example. If people have specific, solvable issues, I ask them to break those out into new reports; if they just want to discuss the symptom in general with a lot of people suffering similarly, I leave the master bug for them.)

[Eleanor Berger (intellectronica)]

I think the ultimate solution, is to progressively load comments into the page, so the only question remaining is whether we can do that quickly enough to solve your problem.

[Gavin Panella (allenap)]

A couple of other approaches might work, and might fit the gap between
now and the best solution:

 * Only truncate comments for anonymous users.

 * Let users opt out of truncation. Record that preference in a cookie.

[Gavin Panella (allenap)]

I think we're agreed that we need to address this in one way or
another, but I don't know when we'll get an opportunity.

Personally, I think we should raise the threshold to 400 right now
because it's an easy config change. That would still address the
original aim of truncating. In fact, 400 was the originally proposed
threshold, but it was lowered during development.

Then, perhaps we ought to get the UI gods to look at this problem?

[era (era)]

Rather than raise the threshold, how about just adding a link to "display last nn comments instead". I think you could even lower the threshold to something like nn = 20 then. (Also a link to "next nn comments" would be very useful if you really are browsing the bug for the first time.)

[Przemek K. (azrael)]

You should make Malone display bugs with lots of comments as separate partial pages with ie. 50 comments each, just like in forums. That would ease the load on Launchpad server and on users' bandwidth. Very rarely people need to see all ie. 500 comments at once.

Example bugs with so much comments:
Bug 59695 (over 700 comments)
Bug 332945 (over 400 comments)

Currently I have troubles displaying the Bug 59695's all comments page - it fails to load at least 5 times in a row.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

I discussed this again with Gavin at UDS. It appears this bug has been blocked because the Launchpad team wishes to implement a more sophisticated comment management system, but there isn't an ETA on when that will be done. In the interim, it still seems worthwhile for implementing something really simple like this.

A further refinement of the idea is to have it display the first 40 and last 40 comments. That way if the initial comments have some useful context, that's still there.

Frankly, the need for this has only grown with time. As Ubuntu increases in popularity, a high profile bug report (linked to from external news sources for example) can easily grow to >500 comments, at which point the full comments view times out, and no one can see recent comments except through email (and as a result, the quality of the comments diminishes swiftly).

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

I think showing the first X and the last Y would be a great idea.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Proof of concept for a fix. Code's a bit hacky, but it works.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Screenshot, shows what display looks like when config is dialed down to show first 4 and last 6 comments.

I was thinking it'd be nice to have it show a more noticeable break between the two sections ala "..." however that could take a bit more hacking. Maybe it's clear enough from the final message what's going on? The messages are numbered too... so maybe a break would just be clutter?

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

On 3 June 2010 07:58, Bryce Harrington <email address hidden> wrote:
> Screenshot, shows what display looks like when config is dialed down to
> show first 4 and last 6 comments.
>
> I was thinking it'd be nice to have it show a more noticeable break
> between the two sections ala "..." however that could take a bit more
> hacking.  Maybe it's clear enough from the final message what's going
> on?  The messages are numbered too... so maybe a break would just be
> clutter?

I think a break in the middle would be good, but it's probably
tolerably clear at the moment.

--
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

I've got a break inserting itself now. Curtis suggested making the break resemble a comment. Thoughts?

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

(Minor tweak, eliminated a doubled bottom border on the break box)

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Including some icons at Curtis' suggestion

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

On 11 June 2010 09:48, Bryce Harrington <email address hidden> wrote:
> Including some icons at Curtis' suggestion
>
> ** Attachment added: "break3.png"
>   http://launchpadlibrarian.net/50101663/break3.png

That's looking good, but rather than having the separate "view all 14
comments" link, why not just make the "14 comments hidden" thing blue,
and clickable to expand the conversation? Also the "reload" icon is a
bit odd here and the disclosure triangle by itself is enough.

Thanks for posting screenshots!
--
Martin

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

(Throw-away patch used for performance checking branch)

[Launchpad QA Bot (lpqabot)]

Fixed in stable r11128 <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/stable/revision/11128>.

[Philip Muškovac (yofel)]

Looks really great on edge and works fine here.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

That's a nice improvement. I will note though that the oops for big bugs shows that Launchpad is still loading all the comments from the database, then throwing most of them away. (This change didn't make things any worse but it could make them better.)