Just heard about Liquid Threads . . . .
Yep, by default we sort "newest first". My experience in Wikipedia suggests that people initially find the "oldest first" order of talk pages counterintuitive and have to be convinced that it's the wiki way. But perhaps it's also something that should be customizable - wouldn't be too hard to add a "sort by" dropdown.
Erik,
A "sort by" dropdown would be pretty cool. However, lets see if there are other bugs or wishlist items that would warrant a high priority for fixing ..;-)
Note added - I see that this reply does not appear in the history.
Ugh, history .. that one will definitely still need some debugging (and usability improvements). It's fairly complex to version the history of an entire tree, so it's a bit prone to bug. We'll try to have comment-level history as well.
Just thinking aloud here. What is the purpose of 'discussion' in this wiki? Is it the same as a threaded forum? (No) I observe huge variation in wikipedia, sometimes it is chronological of the discussions, othertimes it is annotated by points raised in a structured discussion - there is even moderation, reformatting of posts to preserve the sense.
Should anyone edit my posts? Are they actually "posts"? [Hmm, I will see if I can edit some one elses . . ]
Formatting. Do I like the absence of lines, boxes etc, this minimalist view? (I think yes)
Speaking of sort features using drop down menus, and viewing options here is an idea for a wishlist:
What about the ability just to show a collapsed version of just the headers without the corresponding message text?
You could use the "Permalink" to expand the thread or reply to view the text. This way an active discussion with many posts doesn't get too long (thus avoiding unnecessary scrolling).
Perhaps this is in the too hard box for now and not a major priority at this time.
Well, our secure funding runs out in two weeks, so I'm a bit careful to add to the wishlist (though being open source, of course anyone can add to the feature set). I have suggested to David a table of contents for longer talk pages as a navigation tool, which I'd prefer to collapsing the actual threads, at least in the default view.
Scrolling is easier than clicking. But a TOC would be nice, and should be easy to add, as soon as I get a chance. Thanks for your input.
