Reformat email comment notifications to show comments on large entries

[lightgetsin]

Title:
Reformat email comment notifications to show comments on large entries

Area:
notifications

Summary:
When a post is very large and there is an email notification of a comment to it, Gmail will truncate the message after X characters. Probably other webmails do the same. This means that when you open the notification, you can't see the comment, or have access to the links to interact with it, like reply.

Description:
There are a few potential ways to fix this. If a post is larger than a set character count, the notification email could be reformatted so the comment is at the top, followed by the post, which will get truncated. Alternatively, the notification could truncate the entry already so that the comment still follows it like usual, but is sure to show up.

Poll #2057 Reformat email comment notifications to show comments on large entries

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 42

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
15 (35.7%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
8 (19.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
12 (28.6%)

(I have no opinion)
5 (11.9%)

(Other: please comment)
2 (4.8%)

Comments

[azurelunatic]

The as-is that I'm in favor of is top-posting the comment; this is a reasonably frequent suggestion on LJ as well, where there isn't the truncation problem.

[pauamma]

I'd rather keep the entry (or parent comment) first, truncated before emailing if needed/desired. That way, it's easier to figure out what they're replying to than trying to piece it out from a comment that may be rambling, long, disjointed, or utterly unrelated. Also, depending on the limit the webmail service enforces, a long comment could cause the rest of the notification email to disappear.

[archane]

+1

[msilverstar]

Top-posting seems like the only technically-feasible solution.

[foxfirefey]

What if the comment is top posted if the context is over a certain length? I think that would probably be the compromise that satisfies the greatest number of people. (I know that on long posts, it is pain to get down to the bottom to actually see the next comment.)

[azurelunatic]

I'm generally against conditionally swapping the format around because that's then inconsistent.

But I could live with it.