Long ECHI could stand to get broken up

[ladyasul]

Title:
Long ECHI could stand to get broken up

Area:
comments, comment display

Summary:
When the ECHI (Explicit Comment Hierarchy Indicator) gets very, very long, like in a 100+ comment-deep thread, it can do odd and ugly things to the layout. Perhaps it could be broken up with spaces, every so many levels, to avoid mauling page formatting and allow it to wrap and improve ease of reading/understanding?

Description:
On comment pages, when a thread of comments gets very long (as often happens in some conversations, but mostly happens in roleplay threads, in my experience) the ECHI (Explicit Comment Hierarchy Indicator) can get VERY long. As in, absolutely ridiculous. It stretches comment headers and collapsed comments alike, and tends to make the layouts I've tried, including the site-schemed pages, behave poorly because of it.

Plus, after a while, it simply seems to blur into one long trail of characters, to try to read it. Phone numbers are broken up into groups of usually 3 and 4 digits for readability (and ease of remembering.) It would be great if the ECHI output could be broken up as well (by spaces every so many characters?) so that it could be made more human-readable and wrap within comment headers, too.

For example, one actual ECHI from an RP thread I was trying to read is 326 characters long (counting the period at the end.) It would be far nicer if it could be displayed more like this instead:


86a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a1a1 a1a1a1a.


My default font size is fairly normal (14-15px) so I can only imagine how badly the page layouts would break for someone who has their font sizes set much higher for eyesight reasons.

I've tried mucking about with Stylish to make the comments' headers and the collapsed comments simply scroll sideways when this happened, but couldn't find CSS which would do this to my satisfaction and still let the comments stretch horizontally with the page how I wanted them to.

As it is, I switched accounts just so I could read that thread without scrolling horizontally to read each comment's text.

I'm not sure what drawbacks such a fix would have. Maybe there would be disagreements over where to add the spaces so that the ECHI can be wrapped, or it would be difficult to implement? I know that long ECHI strings aren't an issue for most people, but it would be nice for something like this to be implemented for those times where it does become an issue.

Poll #11554 Long ECHI could stand to get broken up

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 43

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
29 (67.4%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
13 (30.2%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (2.3%)

Comments

[erik]

I'd like to be able not to see the ECHI at all, honestly.

[marahmarie]

"My default font size is fairly normal (14-15px)"

Mine is, too, but I have comment titles in my CSS set at 1.5em, I think (125% of 14-16px) so that giant block of ECHI is also this TALL, BOLD, GIANT block of ECHI. And I've grown to hate it. I wish I'd never enabled it because it looks like a pile of spaghetti and red sauce to me the bigger it gets. I can't read it or track it at all. But I keep it because I've heard it helps some people follow threads and thread hierarchies better, and I keep the comment titles big because I like big comment titles... (but now I'm wondering if there's separate HTML for the ECHI I could style with CSS somehow to keep titles big but make ECHI smaller - scrolling I'm not fond of setting, because it can be annoying)...