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from the I'm-so-meta-even-this-acronym dept.
jcd writes:
"I'm rather excited to get going with Soylent and to watch it grow. Nay, help it grow. I have lurked in /. for more than a decade (note: I'm not the same username over there, I know, how sneaky), and always wished I could have been involved with the beginning. So this is a great opportunity, and I joined as soon as I saw what Soylent was doing. Not to mention the fact that I felt right at home with the old style. It's very comfortable.
So here's a question for everyone. Are we going to be the same as slashdot? A clone that focuses as entirely as possible on tech related news? Or will we branch out to other topics? I'm interested to see either way. I posted a comment to this effect in one of our two existing polls, and it may be a community-wide assumption, but I do think it merits a discussion."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DrMag on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:48PM
The above comments I agree with completely, and I would love to have the focus remain clearly on the scientific topics. That's not to say there aren't lots of news stories that are of interest to such a site that don't deal directly with math/science/technology, but interesting insights can come by discussing such topics among a bunch of mathematicians/scientists/engineers/techies, whether they be professional, amateur, or hobbyist.
One thing I would like to see, however, that might be "branching out" from the traditional feel of this type of news site would be a change in the comment system. I know, heresy! Please, hear me out...
One of my biggest gripes with /. was that so often the comments would diverge into off-topic, or at least uninteresting-to-me-topic, and I would have to sort through *hundreds* of comments that were back and forth arguments over semantics, insults, or some such, when all I wanted was more information on the topic itself. One feature that would make a world of difference to me is the ability to instantly collapse an entire thread that diverged away in order to find the other discussions that got buried amid the frenzy more easily.
I'm certain there is a way to keep the general format and feel of the current system we have all come to love while adding in a way to collapse and hide an entire section (even if many of the comments in that section are insightful/funny/whatever). It would also help in following a discussion as comments come in later.
Just my 3.5e-5 BTC. I'd settle for just a better assortment of worthwhile articles without all the fluff.
(Score: 1) by buswolley on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:22PM
That seems reasonable.
subicular junctures
(Score: 2, Informative) by Foobar Bazbot on Friday February 21 2014, @01:20AM
It's my understanding that this greasemonkey script [userscripts.org], which is said to work [dev.soylentnews.org] on soylentnews with one slight modification, will grant you the ability you seek. (Haven't had a chance to try it myself...)
userscript: Expand/Collapse buttons on every comment [userscripts.org]
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday February 21 2014, @02:26AM
For what's its worth, I tried it and no dice even after following the editing instructions to the letter.
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @07:53AM
Of course. "No Dice" is the whole point of Soylent News, after all. ;-)
(Score: 1) by stderr on Friday February 21 2014, @11:07AM
I have only tested this in "Nested"-mode, but if you can make some "pretty" buttons and hook them up to the following hide_comment(cid) and show_comment(cid) functions, I think we got a very simple POC...
cid is of course the comment-id, so hide_comment(4127); should hide your comment (except for the title bar) and all it's replies (including this, so don't try that!).
alias sudo="echo make it yourself #" #
(Score: 1) by stderr on Friday February 21 2014, @11:15AM
The comment systems inserts a blank after every 50 character in long lines of characters to avoid spam. It should be "commentBody" and "commentSub".
alias sudo="echo make it yourself #" #
(Score: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Tuesday February 25 2014, @05:24PM
NCommander, get your numbered polyhedra here. [userscripts.org] No editing needed.
userscript: Expand/Collapse buttons on every comment [userscripts.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Friday February 21 2014, @01:49AM
I second that.
Nothing is more annoying than jumping into an interesting story and find that one of the early comments (so at the top) was some tangential BS that triggers a huge meaningless thread. I mean, I know that geeks can get hung up on something, and then beat it to a pulpy death -- been there done that myself -- but being able to collapse that junk would be awesome. Keeping a count of how many times a thread was collapsed might also be interesting, and maybe apply an automatic downmod to every post in the thread above a certain threshold of collapses.
(Score: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Tuesday February 25 2014, @05:17PM
Remember the greasemonkey script I mentioned?
Fixed it! [userscripts.org]
userscript: Expand/Collapse buttons on every comment [userscripts.org]
(Score: 1) by DrMag on Tuesday February 25 2014, @07:08PM
Very nice, thank you! So far it works perfectly.