Feedback on Threading / Inline Replies

[CarolineS]

Our community has been granted early access to Threading / Inline replies. Yay! I have feedback on it - at least, on how it looks in my community. Not sure how much is skin-specific vs general.

I don't know where to send this feedback so I'm putting it here. Happy to move to a special Early Access group, if one exists, or email to the appropriate person & delete from here if needed. 

One bit of meta-feedback about the Early Access process... I had to go back and forth with support several times to even get this new feature functional. And I have no knowledge of who to give my feedback to or what is expected to be correct vs buggy in this early access version. So, not the best experience as an Early Access user.

But, I digress. Here are my initial impressions of the Threading / Inline reply feature. This is on our staging site, on a responsive community with a pretty lightweight skin.

(1) Lots of spacing oddities even on a very basic thread page (w/ just one reply). See screenshot

(2) Not sure if this reaction will be generally shared amongst my fellow community managers, but I am surprised and disappointed that the thread continues to indent after 1 level of indent. This feels very old-school. Seems that the new model (Facebook, Slack, WebEx Teams) is to create just one level deep of "sub-thread". Screenshot. 

(3) Looks bad on mobile; see screenshot for specifics

All of my complaints notwithstanding, I'm thrilled that Khoros is working on this!

I hope this feedback is useful.

Cheers!

[JasonHill]

@CarolineS 

Good feedback about the design.

Have you got any threads on your Staging site that are really, really long?

We're finding on Workshop that the longer the thread, seemingly the longer the editor takes to pop when a user tries to perform an inline reply. Eg https://www.workshop.com.au/t5/Whole-of-House/Introduce-yourself-to-the-community/td-p/65/page/68

It would be interesting to hear about your experiences of performance.

Thanks,

Jason

[CarolineS]

Hi @JasonHill -

we don’t have any really really long threads on staging but I may create some! 

[JasonHill]

We can see a noticeable different in how quickly the editor pops on even a discussion that is just a few pages long. Given pagination, I don't really understand why. Our team is still investigating... 

[CarolineS]

Hi @JasonHill -

I just created a thread on staging that spans 3 pages of "load more", and the editor still loads fine. I wonder what the difference is between our sites! (or maybe my thread just isn't long enough; I got tired of copy-pasting random replies :-))

[SohilM]

@CarolineS Thanks for the feedback! It looks to me that some of your community CSS is inducing the inconsistencies you are seeing. 

Please see the below screenshot 

1. The Sort option is placed in another div that has an outline, the outline is not shown in your community and is causing that issue of not being in the same line. 
2. Space between Sort and the first reply is for better asthetics of the page.
3. All the elements in the comment are aligned exactly. 
4. The user icon in the bottom reply box is also aligned with the reply to the original topic.

Please see below Responsive screen: 

1. "In response to" is aligned properly. 
2. Indentation is small but was deliberately kept that small given less real estate on the mobile. 

Other Issues:

1. Reply count does not auto update after post. This is a known issue and we are investigating on this. 
2. The threading levels is configurable to 1. By default it is 5. Please contact Support to change this. The thought here was, unlike a social media platform where its a passing discussion, a community will have threads that users will follow completely from the start and more levels of threading is necessary. 

Hope this information helps. Please post here if there is more feedback.

[CarolineS]

@SohilM - Thank you very much for taking the time to look into the issues I reported, and giving detailed feedback. I really appreciate it!

It's too bad that we will need to enlist a developer to make this feature work for us; we don't have dev resources or budget so this will keep us from adopting the feature as soon as we'd like to. But such is life. (If you'd like to help us out with a PS engagement, we would happily take you up on it :-))

An additional piece of feedback after playing with the feature a bit - the reply editor textbox seems a bit short, vertically. Many of the conversations in our community have very long posts, and this short textbox isn't conducive to that. Is the height of the editor configurable?

Thanks!

[CarolineS]

Oh, and I'm glad that the # of threading levels is configurable! It would be great if that was documented in the release notes (apologies if it is and I missed it).

Once this looks good enough to share with our VIP community members, I'll have them try it out and give us feedback on the # of levels that seems most appropriate. My guess is just 2 levels, but we'll see!

Cheers!

[SohilM]

@CarolineS 

The editor can be dragged vertically to increase the size of the text area. There is no configuration to specify a size. 

Threaded levels configuration is not documented in the Release Notes. Will add the info in Release Notes. 

[CarolineS]

Thanks @SohilM! Too bad the height is not configurable. I’ll put in my vote for setting the default a bit taller - maybe 50% increase.

[Claudius]

Thanks for sharing your detailed feedback in such a visual way. Good to see many items I had flagged to @SohilM already during the EA being validated as problematic.

The one feedback item I heard that you hadn't brought up was the inactive "Post Reply" button in the inline reply editor. The fact it's styled in a disabled fashion was flagged as being more of a detractor so we actually got rid of it on our community. The primary call to action being the editor box with the "Reply..." prompt inside.

If anyone wants to see both threading and inline replies in action take a look at this topic on our community: https://community.dataiku.com/t5/Setup-Configuration/Going-from-Prototype-to-Production-SSL-amp-HTTP...

[CarolineS]

Side note - I find it disturbing that Atlas is not yet using threading / inline replies NOR new private messages. How can they expect our communities to upgrade to these features if they can't even do it themselves?

[DanCr]

@CarolineS you can blame me for that one. As we expanded Atlas over the past year, findability and navigability quickly became a pressing issue.

Despite adding a lot more content and conversation, we were seeing some related drops in effectiveness within our Value Analytics scores, thus the redesign became our priority, with PMs and Threading our fast follows. We're hoping to deliver PM v3 next week, with Threading/Inline not far behind.

I'm aware how critical it is to have early examples live in Atlas, so it's extremely rare anything else would take priority for us. 

I can share some good news on that front, in that we've been working on a couple of internal initiatives to significantly improve Atlas' role in demonstrating the best of our new capabilities. My expectation is that through the course of the next 3-9 months, you'll see rapid improvements in both examples and inspiration tied to new releases. This is a personal top priority, so feel free to start prodding me when we're not delivering on that promise.

[CarolineS]

That’s great news, @DanCr! Thanks!

[CarolineS]

OOOOh is threading turned on here in Atlas now? I see the "in response to" notes w/ in content and also the inline replies. Exciting! Interesting that you don't seem to be using indenting though - what was the thought behind that?

I also noticed that the new PM UI seems to be on here in Atlas too. Yay!

[TeroRe]

Testing testing

[DanCr]

Yes, we got there and you beat me to the punch :).

All credit to @AndyK as always, for the tireless work he does to get these planned and out the door.

[CarolineS]

TBH I came on here to whine about something or other last night and then noticed threading and got distracted from my whine 😄

[DanCr]

Ha ha 😁. Let's call that a win for the product!

[JesseW-GD]

I've noticed a bit of the issue with this new threaded conversation style. While I can edit the title of the topic, this doesn't automatically change the title/subject of any replies. They don't show up in the thread anymore (which is good). However, if someone replies inline to one of the replies that still has the old title, it shows up in a few places:

• Browser tab
• Email notifications
• Activity (in the users profile)

This is ultimately very confusing. It was a pain to have to change all of these manually and I was initially very excited to not have to do that anymore, but this may even be worse as it's a super confusing experience for the user. Would love to see this fixed. Is this on anyone's radar already @SohilM @DanCr?

Thanks

[DanCr]

This wasn't on my personal radar @JesseW-GD, but I'll work with the Atlas team here to see what we're seeing / hearing in our own implementation, and come back to you later this week.

As it pertains to whether that's already on the radar of our product team, I'll have to defer to @SohilM, though I've pre-configured a search for you which should let you keep track of current raised Ideas.

[SohilM]

@JesseW-GD Thanks for bringing this up. It was deliberate to keep the subject as "Re: Title of the topic" in 'Email notifications and Activity page' to indicate that this post is a reply. As you already mentioned, users currently cannot edit the subject while replying. However, let me check on the old replies with different titles. 

Can you please provide more details what you meant by "browser tab"? 

[JesseW-GD]

Thanks for the reply @DanCr and @SohilM. Below is a screenshot what I mean by the title being different in the browser tab. This happens if you navigate directly to a reply (like you would if you clicked a link in the subscription notification) or use a permalink. 

Also, to clarify, I'm perfectly fine with the "Re:" part. It would be great if [topic title] was somehow a variable that could be updated when the topic title is updated so there isn't any confusion. Thanks again! 

[SohilM]

Thanks, @JesseW-GD. Got it; will log this issue. 

[StephenB]

Curious if anyone has seen this. I'm making some minor cosmetic adjustments to each indented/threaded reply level, but there's something wonky with the css. This is OOB, by the way. I'd prefer to not rebuild this.

So, for the first and second reply-to message (threaded reply level 1 & 2), the following works just fine for styling.

.lia-threaded-detail-display-message-view .lia-thread-level-01

.lia-threaded-detail-display-message-view .lia-thread-level-02

In the HTML, each level follows logically, so .lia-thread-level-03, .lia-thread-level-04 and so on. The issue I'm seeing is that for level 03 and 04, it resets to 00, for 05 and 06 it resets to 01, for 07 and 08 it resets to 03, and for 09 and 10, it resets to 99... Here's a screencap of the html:

Am I missing something?

[Claudius]

The lia-thread-level-XX CSS classes reflect the reply depth in a thread. If users on your community are replying to the original post message it is expected that the 00 depth is used. Only if they consistently use the reply to message feature to reply to messages it is expected that the depth continually increases.

You can see this in this very discussion here on Atlas as well: Every reply to a reply shows the "In response to YYYY" message detail, while replies to the opening message lack that.

[SuzyVranken]

@SohilMis there an update about this log? We have had the same question for several years now, even from before the threaded option.

I hoped that enabling the threaded option would "resolve" this hazard work our moderators have to do. There was a mention that replies no longer have titles.

Current situation: now when you edit the top topic title, all reply titles need to be changed manually. If you don't do this, the old title remains alive on the reply level. Resulting in showing the old title in the 'new posts page' or in the bread crumbs when someone replies to a reply with an old title. So you are almost obliged to let the moderators change every reply title as well. Which is a lot of work when there are already pages of replies by the time the moderators are online.

The better functionality would be that if a topic title changes, all reply titles change automatically. I know there were already several ideas posted about this one, but so far no good news regarding any changes.