Search Ideas

Implemented as of 632c0d7.

There should be a feature similar to the ‘single comment thread’ feature Reddit has, where you start with some deeply nested child idea and render all of its deeply nested parents above it:

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    G
   /|\
 P1 P2 P3
   \|/
    I

This feature would be great for seeing an idea in its proper context without having to scroll past a bunch of potentially unrelated ideas.

For parent ideas, cycle only through revisions that lead to the target idea. Communicate accordingly in the UI. For the target idea, its children, and any of its siblings’ children, cycle through all revisions.

Every idea should have a link to a separate page with the single comment thread. This could just be ideas#show. That page should also scroll the target idea into view in case its preceded by too much context that would otherwise push it below the viewport.

This feature would also allow me to remove the buggy ‘context’ feature.

The target idea should be scrolled into view. Otherwise, it might not always be visible, which could cause confusion. See eg #1811, which is preceded by a long idea and thus not visible on page load at the time of writing.

Implemented as of 55d02a7.

There should be a feature similar to the ‘single comment thread’ feature Reddit has, where you start with some deeply nested child idea and render all of its deeply nested parents above it:

1
2
3
4
5

    G
   /|\
 P1 P2 P3
   \|/
    I

This feature would be great for seeing an idea in its proper context without having to scroll past a bunch of potentially unrelated ideas.

For parent ideas, cycle only through revisions that lead to the target idea. Communicate accordingly in the UI. For the target idea, its children, and any of its siblings’ children, cycle through all revisions.

Every idea should have a link to a separate page with the single comment thread. This could just be ideas#show.

This feature would also allow me to remove the buggy ‘context’ feature.

Every non-top-level idea should have a link to a separate page with the single comment thread.

Might as well go with top-level ideas, too. That way, when there are other top-level ideas, they get filtered out. Good for zeroing in.

Cycling through revisions on the parent level might hide the idea but that in itself isn’t a big deal: the user can just refresh the page anytime they quickly want to find their way back to the idea.

During testing, I realized this behavior is more confusing than I had initially thought.

There should be a feature similar to the ‘single comment thread’ feature Reddit has, where you start with some deeply nested child idea and render all of its deeply nested parents above it:

1
2
3
4
5

    G
   /|\
 P1 P2 P3
   \|/
    I

This feature would be great for seeing an idea in its proper context without having to scroll past a bunch of potentially unrelated ideas.

Cycling through revisions on the parent level might hide the idea but that in itself isn’t a big deal: the user can just refresh the page anytime they quickly want to find their way back to the idea.

Every non-top-level idea should have a link to a separate page with the single comment thread.

This feature would also allow me to remove the buggy ‘context’ feature.

There should be a feature similar to the ‘single comment thread’ feature Reddit has, where you start with some deeply nested child idea and render all of its deeply nested parents above it:

1
2
3
4
5

    G
   /|\
 P1 P2 P3
   \|/
    I

Cycling through revisions on the parent level might hide the idea but that in itself isn’t a big deal: the user can just refresh the page anytime they quickly want to find their way back to the idea.

Every non-top-level idea should have a link to a separate page with the single comment thread.

This feature would also allow me to remove the buggy ‘context’ feature.

good idea!

For example, I had to manually notify Edwin in #1811 of a revision I had made to address a criticism of his. Without this notification, he might miss the revision. If he disagrees that the revision addresses his criticism, that’s a potential error that might not get corrected.

When you revise an idea to address a criticism, its author should get a notification so they get a chance to verify that the revision really does address the criticism.

Or the existing search page could be filtered by discussion. For example, I could link to that page with an additional query param discussion_id=1 or something like that.

Or each discussion could have a search/filter form to filter ideas not just by criticized or not but also content and potentially other attributes.

Feature to collapse all criticized ideas of a discussion? Useful for todo lists.

Feature to collapse all criticized ideas on a page? Useful for todo lists.

Fixed as of 76b7ab4.

Make sure cycling between a leaf revision with children and a leaf revision without children properly toggles the gutter.

Cycling through the revisions of a leaf reveals its gutter, which should be hidden since it’s a leaf.

Sometimes you just want to hide the comments without collapsing the parent idea.

Because that would mean hiding each comment individually if you ever do want to hide all comments of an idea.

Bulk

Because that would mean hiding each comment individually if you ever do want to hide all comments of an idea. And sometimes you just want to hide the comments without collapsing the parent idea.

Having features to both collapse an idea and hide all its comments seems like an opportunity for unification. Why not just go with collapsing and remove the ability to hide all comments?

Done as of fcf578c.