Fugliness
The thread's summary was edited
In which a lively discussion is held, in full good humour, about the visual virtue of MediaWiki's latest offering.
better now?
My take on the fugliness has more to do with how chunky the whole thing is, and how much screen real estate each message takes up. It's got an unwieldy feel about it, if that makes sense. Although I know some folks were more motivated by the shaded background.
Still seems a bit buggy/clunky to me, though I very much like the overall idea. Just sayin'.
The idea is great, but it makes things take up far too much space. It's not just the sig/buttons, it's all the extra whitespace. With just 5 comments, this topic was already taking up half a screen. That will make long topics on WIGO:CP or SB almost unreadable.
I agree with you there - I'm not sure places like TWIGOCP and the Saloon Bar would benefit from this system. Perhaps for that type of informal discussion a modified, streamlined version of liquidthreads would be more appropriate, but they're obviously not developing something like that.
The forumspace, however, would benefit from looking more like an organized forum.
TWIGO:CP and the Saloon bar would benefit more because they have a lot of unrelated threads, with a higher chance of ECs, and a huge db size overhead. The Forum is actually a partial solution to the same problem LQT is trying to solve, because it separates threads into individual pages, LQT goes further and makes each comment a separate page.
I am getting substantial load times on this page. Is it just me?
Problem is, if you had the same amount of comment traffic we do now, this version of LQT would increase the screen length what, four times? That's a hell of a lot of scrolling, and to my mind that makes things less readable, even with the benefit of doing away with the occasional EC (and they only ever happen to me occasionally, so to me they're not a big deal).
This layout on those pages would be a total disaster. We'd make the World's Highest Website look like a speed bump.
I've decreased the padding and hidden the toolbar (the reply, parent, more buttons in the lower right of each comment) until you hover over a comment. Better?
I agree its looking pretty good, just the load times on this page seem excessive.
Yeah, LQT could do with some optimizations. The problem is that since each comment is a separate page, there's a performance overhead - similar to how template signatures slow down the saloon bar drastically.
Isn't this essentially the same as the best of Conservapedia, in that you have hundreds of little pages being displayed on one using Ajax? Why does that load so much faster than?
Not ajax, it's assembled server-side, but it still has to collect all those pages (in the case of bestof, they're just database entries, not MW pages) and parse them separately. I think the separate parsing is the problem.
I think it looks loads better. It's also not much bigger than the usually talk page crap. And separating and boxing the comments makes it far more readable.
I assume that sectioning off threads properly would stop the massive load times. Loading something the size of the entire SB with this would be insane (I have issues loading it sometimes), but one section at a time wouldn't be too bad - indeed, it would be preferable compared to scrolling up and down it.
The biggest problem, IMHO, is that we're used to the "normal" system, so have gotten used to the quirks and can generally parse the horribleness and deal with the edit conflicts. This is a system that solves problems that we no longer notice! And because we're also used to talk pages running on, splitting it up into threads would be slightly different to get used to.
Solving problems that we don't notice while creating problems which we do notice doesn't seem like it's going to help us massively. I think there's still quite a lot that would need to improve before this could be used on wider scale, like the mess it makes of recent changes, user contributions & watchlists by having edits & comments in conflicting formats.
I'm still not convinced that this will be an ideal system for wiki-noobs. Most online forums have a straightforward system where users either reply to an existing thread or start a new one, but liquidthreads is more complicated. Being able to cut & move threads may be useful, but the reply button against each individual post is confusing. It's not obvious whether the right thing to do when posting in a thread is to reply to the initial post, or reply to the post above. Plus there's always the possibility that a new user, who is used to wikis but confused by liquidthreads, may just click "edit" at the top of the page & hence start a thread outside of the liquidthread & make a mess of the talk page.
I guess the best way to check whether it really is user-friendly for noobs would be to post welcome messages etc. using liquidthreads on new users' talk pages & if they respond to it. But it's probably a bit early to try this yet.