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Mikeh_
Scholar

Forum Layout Change

I used to be able to go straight to the last page of a topic to see the latest posts but this seems to have disappeared?

have tried sorting from Newest to Oldest but this doesn’t seem to work ? 

5 REPLIES 5
RoyB
Legend

@Mikeh_ 

I’m still feeling my way through what’s happened, so don’t take this as gospel, but I think what’s happened is summarised in this post of mine:-

https://community.nowtv.com/t5/Setup-Performance/Ping-and-download/m-p/582283/highlight/true#M12608

There’s more to be found reading from slightly higher up in the thread:-

https://community.nowtv.com/t5/Setup-Performance/Ping-and-download/m-p/582099#

I suspect that Now will have to have a rethink over this, at least by rendering earlier posts in the flat, pure Oldest to Newest, structure we are used to (and thought that was all there was) instead of the hierarchical structure of Replys to Replys to Replys that the software was secretly recording, and is now presenting the postings with.

 

Set a Payment PIN on your account so that no-one but you can buy memberships on it. Check your bank accounts monthly for any other unexpected payments to Now. That way you can at least nip them in the bud, while you and Now figure out whose fault they are.
Mikeh_
Scholar

Thanks @RoyB 

nst
Elite

I hope this is fixed soon.

 

The update has made the forum unusable.  The long AppleTV thread which I frequently use is now seemingly impossible to get to the 'end' of and read the latest reply.

If there is no fix for this, then I guess we will have to abandon that old, long

Simon-J
Community Manager
Community Manager

@Mikeh_ @nst @RoyB 

Hi all,

So to explain the change (I'll publish a guide on this soon) replies are now showing in order, where as before they were simply being shown one after the other in terms of date posted. So the idea here was to make it more obvious when responding to someone's comment.

So the forum has always recognized when a post was being replied to it just previously displayed this in a "linear" format whereas now it is showing these in a "threaded" format. As a result on older posts you're seeing very long threads of replies where as if this had always been in place there'd be more replies to the first post and less replies to individual replies. So not so much "secretly recording" as displaying differently.

Unfortunately this has caused some issues, especially in longer threads. where the "load previous replies" and "load more replies" cut off comments and don't allow you to just skip to the end of the thread - We'd like to change back to the old method of numbered pages, it won't be an instant change but it will return.

 For longer threads in general like the Apple one you have mentioned, it's good practice to lock these when they start to go off topic - somthing that we've not been doing that we should be, that's not to say you can't start the topic again it just helps keep things fresh and perhaps avoids extra long topics that veer from the original subject.

RoyB
Legend

I’ll rephrase “secretly recording” if you like - quietly recording, invisibly recording? - nothing sinister there though, just that the metadata for each posting has always contained the information about which posting it was a reply to, but it has never before been used to sequence it.

I can see the benefits of the threaded approach, once we realise we are using it and can proceed accordingly, but I do wonder if every posting from before this started shouldn’t be recategorised as a ‘Post Reply’ reply, which will put these, at least, into the linear format we thought we were using, while still allowing new postings to use the threaded structure.

The hierarchical threaded structure though, still has ramifications for the Community Activity display, where it used to be that you could go into the thread at the first post that had put it into the Activity list, and then read forward through any later unread posts. This is no longer possible, as the unread posts can now be potentially widely separated, and newer postings made after the one that promoted the thread in Community Activity can even precede it.

Hence, I think, you now have a newer strategy where the Community Activity link is to ‘first unread’, which neatly accommodates changes to where the first unread is made after the Community Activity entry has been made.

But which, when you pop a posting into the middle of that Apple thread, puts you at the beginning, unless you have followed it right from the start, and invites you to read the whole damn thing 😛

In practice, this doesn’t seem to be an insurmountable problem in short threads that you can quickly rescan from the top if necessary, but will be in longer threads.

Software for Usenet Newsgroups knows how to handle these issues, but requires a graphical approach. I’ve just been looking at some, toggling between Threaded and List view, and it’s notable that List view is strictly linear, with the hierarchy information used in Threaded view ignored. Perhaps they know a thing or two?

Set a Payment PIN on your account so that no-one but you can buy memberships on it. Check your bank accounts monthly for any other unexpected payments to Now. That way you can at least nip them in the bud, while you and Now figure out whose fault they are.