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Feature Request: New Replies box?
By larsdahl , Section Wishlist [] Posted on Thu Jul 12, 2001 at 12:00:00 PM PST

One thing I've noticed as I've posted more and more on Scoop sites is the difficulty in tracking new replies to comments, particularly your older posts. As you get some comment history behind you, it begins to be quite difficult to notice changes in the number of replies you've had to given comments. I feel that a New Replies box would overcome this difficulty nicely.

I'm aware of the Mailto/X New Replies request currently on the Feature Request list in Sourceforge, but I feel that this doesn't solve the issue in the best possible way. Mailed notification is useful, despite the potential for abuse, but a Hotlist-like box of the new replies would not only avoid the abuse issue, but make the subsequent reply process much quicker by providing links to the replies right from the user's sidebar.

In terms of added processing overhead to Scoop, I can't see that this would add much more than the Mailto/X New Comments feature would, apart from a small constant overhead with each new post submission on updating the parent comment author's New Replies list, and a small look-up time for the list on each page refresh. There will be some (not insignificant) storage overheads, though; an additional table for every user would be required to implement this list, and if unconstrained, could add up to some significant storage requirements in the long-term. This storage issue could be mitigated in a number of ways:

Removal of new reply entries when the reply is clicked through from the New Replies box,
Removal after a system-wide/user-defined number of new replies,
Removal after a system-wide/user-defined amount of time or user activity (this could add more processing/storage overhead), or
All of the above.
Implementing a size-constrained list will also avoid cluttering up the user's sidebar, another potential concern with this feature.

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Poll

New reply counters and notification systems?

· Only new reply counters on your comments (X New Replies) are useful 0%

· Only mailed new reply notification is useful 0%

· Only sidebar box notification is useful 12%

· Both new reply counters and mail notification are useful features 0%

· Both new reply counters and sidebar box notification are useful features 50%

· Both mailed and sidebar box notification are useful features 0%

· All these features are useful 25%

· The current system's fine - you're just not l33t enough to remember all the replies you've ever gotten :) 12%

Votes: 8
Results | Other Polls

Related Links

· Scoop
· Mailto/X New Replies
· More on Feature Requests
· Also by larsdahl

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Feature Request: New Replies box? | 1 comment (1 topical, 0 hidden)

a few thoughts (none / 0) (#1)
by ikarus on Sat Jul 14, 2001 at 10:03:34 AM PST

i've often wanted a feature like this myself. Using the 'your comments' link or digging through my old stories gets a little old.

i don't think that a feature like this requires any extra tables though. it's been a while since i looked at the scoop db (an then only very briefly), but the same affect can be acheived through some SQL. i created a similar feature for one of the sites i work on. the query i use is something like this:



select c1.Comment_ID, c1.Subject, c1.User_ID, c1.Post_ID from comments c1, comments c2 where c2.User_ID = '$username' and c1.Parent = c2.Comment_ID and c2.Post_ID != '0' order by c1.Date desc limit 10

since nesting comments usually have a reference to their parent comment via an ID you can do this.

similarly, it would also be nice to have information about pending stories in the same type of 'user activity' box.

taking the whole idea even one step further, could also be really cool (at least i think so). you may have noticed this story which was recently posted to k5. it explains a site called fyuze which allows one to provide customized information for users. this means that you could take something like the box described above, and make it available to people when they log on via fyuze. this allows them to avoid having to 'dig' down a page or two on the k5 site to get at the info they want. essentially all you need to accomplish this is a script or function which accepts a username and password and generates the results. could be very cool.

i think features like this will become more and more prevelent as technologies like .Net (gasp) take off. perhaps a 'remote authorization key' should be added to the user table, to allow thrid-party sites to collect info for users, but not compromise login passwords.

Feature Request: New Replies box? | 1 comment (1 topical, 0 hidden)

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