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azurelunatic) wrote in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_suggestions2010-09-17 10:03 pm
Send errors on failed comment expansion
Title:
Send errors on failed comment expansion
Area:
comments, making things make sense
Summary:
When a comment cannot be expanded for any reason, give an error instead of failing silently.
Description:
Sometimes you're trying to expand a comment thread, and for whatever reason, it does not work. Currently, the page stays the same as it was, and does not give a clue as to what the problem is; the user tends to have to open the thread in a new tab, or refresh the page.
Instead, an informative error message should expand where the comment should have been. Thus the only time there is no action should be when there are problems in communication between site and browser. This would be less frustrating, make more sense, and follow good programming principles to boot. It's likely to be slightly more expensive to serve an error instead of nothing, but this could well trade off in fewer needless thread and page loads. This might even be a good thing for Weird Client Stuff of the future, and possibly even the current download-comments thing.
Some of the reasons a comment might not expand:
Comment is deleted. (Although this should be pretty apparent.)
Comment has been deleted since the time of page load.
User has deleted themselves and taken their comments with them. (Also sometimes since time of page load.) [Edit: I wrote this up for LJ suggestions first; DW users don't currently have the ability to do that.]
User has been suspended. (Also sometimes since time of page load.)
Comment has been screened and you cannot see it.
Entry owner has disabled comments and you cannot see them. (In this case, to avoid giving away too much information that only the entry owner would know, any comment that exists or doesn't exist on a comments-disabled entry should return the sort of error where the only information is that comments have since been disabled.)
Whole entry has been locked since time of page load.
Whole entry has been suspended since time of page load.
Whole entry has been deleted since time of page load.
It could feed drama-llamas by alerting people to when something's disappeared so they have time to get screencaps before refreshing, but if something's already got drama-llamas in it, they're likely already making screencaps, and experienced drama-llamas already know that you open it in a new tab. In any case, this does not seem like the sort of improvement where "But users might behave worse than they already do!" should be reason enough to not do this.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 42
This suggestion:
Should be implemented as-is.
39 (92.9%)
Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
0 (0.0%)
Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)
(I have no opinion)
3 (7.1%)
(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)
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Especially since silent failure is all too frequent for me with DW since apparently there are routing problems between my home systems and DW.
And nowhere else.
Just DW.
...yeah. But expanding cut tags that don't, expanding comments that don't, entries and polls in new tabs that come up 404...all too common. Silent failure is assumed to mean retry. Fails again? Retry. Fails again? Okay, maybe I should reload the source and see what's up.
No more silent failures of "expand"?
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(See, I have that turned on for