Hide read comments
16 points by iv
16 points by iv
I sometimes want to hide comments I've already read so that it's easier for me to find the unread comments of a story I revisit. I made a bookmarklet for this:
document.querySelectorAll(".comment:not(:has(.comment_unread))").forEach((comment) => comment.style.display = "none")
Would this (with a better UX design) be an interesting feature for others?
Adjacently, I find the current unread tracking really stressful, mentally reinforcing this idea that opening the comments page requires me to read the whole comments section (or, especially that I have to read all the new ones when I come back). And that reloading the page by accident (these links are tiny on mobile!) loses all that state!
I don't know if I have a proposal for a better system… maybe having a manual button for "I've read until here, mark all comments above this one as read"?
Someday we'll get back all the features of Usenet read with slrn.
We have most of them thanks to the mailing-list mode. The only big one missing is superseding to handle edits!
Edit(!): well, the other feature we are missing is spam, of course :-P
Unread comments are highlighted in red, so I don't have this problem.
I find the red highlighting insufficient when I want to read the 3 new comments on a page with 40+ comments. Especially when the first unread is near the top so then the jump to unread feature doesn’t help. I have to scroll down manually until I see a red comment, which takes time especially on mobile. I think the suggestion from OP is a good one and I support it personally
If you click or tap the red "unread" text - at the top of the thread with a count, or in a comment header - it takes you to the next unread comment.
It helps, but I still think something similar to how RES (reddit enhancement suite) does it would be nice. In RES, if all comments in a thread are read, the whole thing is hidden. Unread comments are shown, and their parents are collapsed and muted in colour.
Oh! Thanks, that’s useful. I don’t think I would have figured out the part about clicking on the comment header on my own
It's a bit obtuse. Just like clicking the timestamp "x hours ago" to actually go to the comment in the thread.
I don't quite understand your use, did you mean to say "when the first unread is not near the top"?
It's not obvious, but you can click the red 'unread' in the summary above the comments ("28 comments, 3 unread") to jump to the first unread comment.
How I wrote it was actually how I did mean it. My point was that that if the top unread comment is near the top, then clicking/tapping on the unread in the summary didn’t help me find the subsequent unread comments. If I were to diagram it, where U1..3 are unread comments and r1..15 are read comments
If the comments are
r1
r2
U1
r3
..
r15
U2
U3
Then jumping to U1 doesn't help me find U2 or U3, I've been doing that manually for the past 6 years or however long I've been using the feature. I only found out today in the sibling thread that I can jump from U1 to U2 by clicking Unread above U1
Ah, I follow, thanks. I'm sorry it was so inconspicuous you didn't notice the feature. I considered that a button or underline would be more obvious UI, but the drawback is that it would be kind obnoxious in such a high-visibility, high-touch part of the interface. Perhaps also the difference between its red highlight and the styling of the rest of the line, all of which are clickable elements, accidentally implies that it is not clickable. I've got some UI design books near the top of my reading queue, so maybe I'll find a better idea in there. (Or maybe someone will contribute one!)
Perhaps it could be underlined only when it’s been navigated to by clicking a previous unread link? Then it still aids discoverability but isn’t too visually intrusive.