top level/flat comments as default entry view option

[unicorn]

Title:
top level/flat comments as default entry view option

Area:
Site's view style as implemented through Manage Account page

Summary:
The My Account Settings page gives us the option of ticking a box that will show all entries in our own style. Why not further customize the entry view defaults using the newly available Top Level and Flat comment page options?

Description:
The "View comment pages in your own style" option under the Display section in Account Settings is a simple way to further customize your Dreamwidth experience. It operates by automatically displaying links to other peoples' entries with the addition of an "?style=mine." You can always manually remove that part of the link if you want to view the original style, and it makes reading comment pages easier for many people who dislike having to deal with a bunch of different styles.

Because the new "Top Level Comment" and "Flat" options for comment pages are also accessed via link changing (adding "&view=top-only#comments" or "&view=flat#comments" to the end of the existing link), it seems to me like it would be simple to add another ticky box under the Display section: "Comment Page Default View" or something of that nature, with a dropdown menu containing the options Threaded, Top Level, and Flat - the way the Entry View Style looks right now, basically, with a similar function. This would be even easier to maneuver around than the ?style=mine change if you got to a top level comment page and decided you wanted to see the threaded version, because the links to different styles of comment pages are already automatically available at the top of every entry.

This would be useful for people whose reading lists and preferred reading areas on the site tend to be either extremely large or extremely small. A default top level comment view would easily let you see what topic discussions were being started in extremely large posts without having to load a thousand comments, and flat only would let you see everything being said at once in smaller posts (you'd just have to be careful not to click 1k comment monsters casually if you had that option turned on!)

Honestly, if only one of these could be implemented, a default top level view seems more potentially useful to me, and maybe only a few people would use even that. But since this is so close in execution to an option already available to us, it seems to me (though I have no background in coding to verify this!) that the effort required to offer either or both of these as potential default views as well would be worth the payoff.

Poll #8831 top level/flat comments as default entry view option

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 54

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
24 (44.4%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (1.9%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
6 (11.1%)

(I have no opinion)
22 (40.7%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (1.9%)

Comments

[msilverstar]

I agree that these features should be accessible somewhere other than the location bar, but setting defaults is also a quite obscure. I would prefer somewhere visible during reading, like the nav bar or the sidebar module.

[matgb]

FWIW, I hacked my reading page to give me the ability to open a post in default (their) style, my style or plain-works well for me and it would be fairly easy to ass links making it ?view=flat, etc from a link.

Maybe writing a howto on doing this along with an improvement in the S2 UI would be good for most?

[unicorn]

Both of these are really good thoughts. Being able to tick something off in the nav bar and then refresh the page you were reading to change all the links would be much easier and more intuitive than my idea, actually.

And I'd imagine this would be a low-priority job if it was made more accessible somewhere, so it'd be wonderful to have a clearly defined way to hack it in the meantime — I have no idea how to do that, personally.

[unicorn]

and if anyone ever comes back to this post and wants to try the fix matgb suggested, someone figured out how to do it here

[unicorn]

If people come back to this post: another thing this could be is an optional link to include in layouts that didn't necessarily require knowledge of S2 to implement, since I didn't know how to do that at all without help even when similar code was presented to me!