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dw_suggestions2017-04-08 07:40 pm
"Activity"-like view of 1st page of Inbox, in a dropdown, from Navigation Strip
Title:
"Activity"-like view of 1st page of Inbox, in a dropdown, from Navigation Strip
Area:
navigation strip, messaging
Summary:
It is currently very easy to configure your Inbox to serve as an activity notification hub. It would be very useful to have a shorted version of the first page of that Inbox be accessible via a dropdown on the Navigation Strip, and allow some manipulation of your Inbox via that dropdown.
Description:
Each line of the proposed dropdown would contain a one line description of the activity. (N replied to [your post|comment], N messaged you, subject "", N posted to group X, and so on). Each entry would contain an "x" dismissal button which would delete the notification from both the Inbox and the dropdown. Clicking on an individual entry outside of the dismissal button would take you to the item about which you are being notified - the message, the comment made, etc - and mark it as read. A "see all" entry at the bottom of the dropdown could take you to the current Inbox view.
Currently, using the Inbox as a notification centre results in large numbers of page swaps and reloads, as you go from Inbox to post to Inbox to reply form to Inbox etc., etc., etc., with mark-as-read and delete-item as separate actions across separate pages. Further, it is difficult to maintain (de-clutter, etc) without engaging in that maintenance as a separate task. As a result, those of us who have this issue end up with over-full Inboxes that we tend to bulk-delete. This suggested feature would allow us both to use our Inbox more easily and maintain it more effectively, resulting in improved usability of the service and - hopefully - fewer notifications being stored on the servers.
This suggestion:
Should be implemented as-is.
9 (24.3%)
Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
5 (13.5%)
Shouldn't be implemented.
6 (16.2%)
(I have no opinion)
17 (45.9%)
(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)
Re: thoughts on a more substantial change
(We also run greylisting, have for years, it's a necessity.)
Another thing that needs to happen is a proper clean, simple, and responsive basic journal style - something not unlike the year styles of Wordpress, perhaps. It should be one that people can customise, of course, and it should be the default style on new accounts, and the standard version of it should be selectable view-in-style option (see also: "Mobile style" shown in the mobile navbar dropdown.) All this is in part because Dreamwidth needs to work on mobile, and right now, it mostly kinda doesn't.
I don't know whether this is something which can be handled in the current style system. Can it?
Re: thoughts on a more substantial change
And I have fished it out of my spam folder after thinking "huh, I should have gotten that by now"!
Journal styles are more complicated than site pages, but we can definitely talk about that too! (We do have Mobility, a style that's designed to work well on mobile, but there's still a ton of stuff we can do; we've just been limited by a lack of designers and by a large percentage of the site still being in the old custom templating language that Brad dreamed up even before LJ existed. We're converting it, but sloooowly.)
Re: thoughts on a more substantial change
eta: lololol I didn't even mean that XD
("my live [as in visible online] journal here at Dreamwidth")
Re: thoughts on a more substantial change
Ha! Yeah, go ahead and make one and then drop me the username, I'll give it some paid time. (Or you could get an account on our hosted-developer-environments service, but a full dev environment might be overkill for you...)
Re: thoughts on a more substantial change
check out
(my goal is to take the default new user style, clean it up (there are a lot of problems tbh, not the least of which is that fonts behave really differently across different browsers) and make it automatically flip into optimised-for-phone mode if viewed in such an environment.)
Re: thoughts on a more substantial change
I may've gone ahead and written 470 lines of new CSS for the default new user style (Neutral Good) that fixes a fleet of bugs in the style and also adds pretty functional mobile support
I mean sure, it's an alpha, but - you want mobile Dreamwidth, Artie? You got it.
Anybody sees this, it really is an alpha, report bugs over here please.
Re: thoughts on a more substantial change
We aren't wedded to Practicality/Neutral Good as a default style, btw -- we used to run polls every six-to-nine months for the userbase to decide on what the default style for new accounts should be, but we haven't done it for a while because it's kind of a pain and there's always eight billion other things further up the list. So we can always change it. I like the first look at it and will do a full accessibility review when I get a chance!
(A lot of stuff may also be doable at the system layer without needing all that CSS, too, but I am soooo not the person to look into that;
Re: thoughts on a more substantial change
Version 0.8 alpha released. Same place. Lots of bugs fixed, a good bit more cleanup, vastly improved comment trees on mobile. I'm using a > symbol where I'd rather be using a right-pointing black triangle but Dreamwidth's parser breaks if I use that, so I'm doing with the > for now.
no subject
no subject
I may've had some cider but I'm not drunk-typing. Pretty sure. Might be but it's cool.
Basically the existing default style for new users doesn't work at all well on phones and has a lot of problems on desktop for that matter so I've taken a run at fixing both problems and maybe a couple of others because I'm 140% serious, new users need to be dumped into a functional environment without crushed text and a mobile view that pretty much doesn't and other brokenness, right?
You should look at
One of the biggest problems of course is the double-margins/double-boundaries and acres of floating lines, which isn't good on desktop but is particularly problematic on a mobile device (particularly a phone) because holy crow you don't have room for that shit. Plus it's mostly just visual distraction anyway.
(Also the eye-flow on desktop is kind of "LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT NOW I'M STARING INTO A BLACK VOID WHAT IS GOING oh it's just the banner, there's the journal, below it" so that kinda needed to be addressed too.)
I'm not trying to make a new style from scratch with this project tho', I'm basically trying to go with, "okay, what can we do quickly to fix the current default style so that new users get a generally functional experience straight out the gate," because what they do after that with customisation is their own lookout. XD
anyway, hiya!
no subject
For sure - though we probably can't make any changes to the desktop view and keep it the same layout, because current users will notice a 2px change in where something is, and they will revolt :P (I did the conversion of site-styled entry/comment pages from the old awful system to S2, and I'm not even exaggerating about 2px changes). On a related note, this was a thing brought to my attention by a friend last week - does it seem like a useful general stop-gap measure? It wouldn't be hard to implement across the style system more generally.
no subject
My primary concern at the moment is new users. People who are here already would be able to switch to it, of course, but new users could be being handed a more functional experience in very short order - at least, if the CSS layer I've been writing can be rolled out. (It would require more testing, of course, I've only been testing it on Safari and Firefox on OS X/MacOS, but still: it could be done quickly.)
no subject
Ah, okay! I misunderstood something farther up in the comment chain, carry on :) I can also maybe point more people at it for a greater range of test data if you'd like? I don't want to accidentally overwhelm you, though!
Do it.
Re: Do it.
Sure thing - is it also live on your test account?
Re: Do it.
Re: Do it.
aw. yeah. XD
Re: Do it.
Nice! I will point at the test account but leave the caveat that things may go really weird occasionally.
Re: Do it.
Specifically to here:
https://solarbird.dreamwidth.org/1533020.html
Re: Do it.
I can do that! Mostly I wanted to be able to point people at somewhere that already has it installed if they want to have a look but not install it themselves.
Re: Do it.
Re: Do it.
(Updated links and data: https://solarbird.dreamwidth.org/1533020.html )
Is there a way to detect whether accessibility is on in comments so we don't have two depth number systems running at once?
Re: Do it.
There should be, at the S2 level if nothing else. I'll dig into it and let you know.
Re: Do it.
Re: Do it.
Re: Do it.
Re: Do it.
Re: Do it.
no subject