Comment Feed for Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue (Coffeehouse on Channel 9)

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Herbie Smith — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:09:50 GMT

I heard nurses -- I mean how many doctors do you know that actually spend time with patients? :D

Herbie

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

SlackmasterK — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:44:19 GMT

I thought doctors made the worst patients? Though I hear developers make the best testers...

Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

SlackmasterK — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:40:39 GMT

That's a good way to do quotes :) If we could drum up something like this simple box without having to declare our own markup, that would make up for the lack of [quote] tags imho.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Minh — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:39:25 GMT

Dr Herbie wrote:
They say that Nurses make the worst patients; looks like developers make the worst customers, too. ;)

They are a finicky bunch.

Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Herbie Smith — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:35:09 GMT

They say that Nurses make the worst patients; looks like developers make the worst customers, too. ;)

Hebrie

Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Minh — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:29:29 GMT

HumanCompiler wrote:
Would you all rather I not be transparent and tell you what we're working on?

Transparency isn't an end goal, it's an effect. It's clear that feedback goes into a void when you hear things like "How we manage our team and our time is up to us, not you guys." If that's your idea of "transparency", then it's a pretty useless term to me.

HumanCompiler wrote:
Is 75% of our dev team working on Channel 9 not good enough? While we've been super focused on Channel 9 there are always other things going on.

Oh? Let's try to be transparent. What are your dev team working on?

HumanCompiler wrote:
We need the right set of features to not lose our current viewers while adding the right features to gain new users.

Ah, there's that magic word again. "Viewer". Posters & readers be damned.

HumanCompiler wrote:
How we manage our team and our time is up to us, not you guys.

OK, OK. Geez. I get it.

HumanCompiler wrote:
The site is still usable.

Wow! "usable". You're taking this "aim low" thing to a new height.

HumanCompiler wrote:
If you think it's not, take a break.

Huh? What do you mean?

Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Rowan — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:32:11 GMT

Page loading times from Australia, with Fx3 and Firebug 1.2...

Front page:
Uncached = 4.53 seconds
Cached = 1.52 seconds

This thread (page 1):
Uncached = 10.23 seconds
Cached = 5.95 seconds (354 KB [4 KB from cache])

And if you think that's bad, you should see what it's like when I'm capped. ;)

But I'm not really complaining, I don't consider the loading time that big of an issue because by the time I've opened several tabs the first page is ready.

Just add a quote button to the editor, or a 'quote' link beside each 'reply' link.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Sven Groot — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:03:27 GMT

The problem that makes navigating the site so much slower for me is this: I visit quite a few forums, all of which (except C9) have the ability to jump to a specific page. My normal modus operandi when I see a thread has new post is to open the last page, and then look for the first new post.

On C9, I now quite often find myself doing this: open the thread (which opens the first page), scroll down looking for a new post, don't find one, assume I clicked on the wrong thread or something, go back, click the thread again, scroll down again, find no new post again, oh wait it has more than one page, go to last page and then do my usual stuff. This takes much longer.

As for direct page links: I have quite a good memory for numbers, so if I'm really following a thread I usually remember how much pages a thread was the last time I checked it so I open that page instead of the last one. If you implement opening the first unread post then I wouldn't need it for that though.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Maddus Mattus — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:56:39 GMT

Just provide some way to navigate directly to the last page from the thread index.

It saves us a click and a wait.

Like I suggested before, I would like to see that when I click on the name of the person who last replied to the thread, that I navigate directly to the page his reply is on.

It makes no sense to put a big sign up saying; 'Hey look, someone has replied to your thread at 13:10:22 12-2-2008!' and then make me click, wait, click, wait and then read the reply. It's not very user friendly to point me to something and then make me find my own way to it.

P.S. Good luck with the baby and the house, you describe exacly why I am doing it in reverse order ;)

Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Erik Porter — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:45:56 GMT

Yup, will do. Just making sure we don't really need to bring page numbers page. If there's a situation where it makes a lot of sense, we can that's why I want to hear more.

Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Bas — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:43:21 GMT

I agree, but: I don't know what kind of content is on the last page of a thread either. All I know is what was on the page that contained the last comment I read, but I have no way of knowing if that, by now, is the last page or not. The system knows, though: have it bring up that page for me. :P

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Erik Porter — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:13:06 GMT

I'm tired. Been working late nights to fix bugs and certain features for C9, baby has been waking up crying a lot lately (he's teething) and wife and I are scrambling to pack and paint our new (first) house in preparation to move this weekend.

I actually thought about that one though to make sure my double negative worked. :)

Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Erik Porter — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:11:22 GMT

General question to all who care about page numbers: Why do you need them? Do you know what page certain content is on? How often did you use them? And again, why? :)

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

me — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:10:24 GMT

master plan - step one: get HC to talk backwards like me:

"There's not much I'm not allowed to say. " (hc)

objective complete

future self

haha

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Erik Porter — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:09:59 GMT

Also (this is for everyone that really, really requested server loading of comments), if we had stayed with client side loading of comments and threads, 290 KB would only be a problem once. The contents of the initial page would be the same every time and would come from cache and the data would come down (very small amount of data) and be databound on the client. 290 KB or 10 KB (and an extra connection). For international users that take a longer time to connect to our servers I can understand server loading being faster, but now there's much (like 300 times more) data being sent down every time there's a new comment. As I mentioned, over time we'll shrink that number, but it'll take some time.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Erik Porter — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:03:47 GMT

There's not much I'm not allowed to say. My transparency is real. I'm not hiding anything and telling you guys exactly what we think (as best as I can properly represent) and EXACTLY what I'm thinking (for whatever that's worth).

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Erik Porter — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:01:42 GMT

If it's at all faster, then I think we're doing well and as I mentioned, we'll continue to improve it.

As for why it's still much slower, not sure I agree it's much slower, but I'm not on your connection so I can't say for sure. It's not much slower from a clicks perspective since it's only one extra click (go to the thread then click the last button), but again (I'm such a broken record) that's coming (and will be better than it was in v3 [take you to the last unread post instead of the last page).

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

me — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:00:51 GMT

and bla bla bla... ;)

i think its great you guys disclose whats going on.

is it even allowed?

be careful.

Future self

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Erik Porter — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:57:41 GMT

Not sure what happened if it resolved itself. Sometimes IE is just flaky with that stuff too. We've had problems elsewhere with IE (as you might have guessed).

As for the page being so large, yes, it is. No disagreement here...that sucks. That said, is the site running slow for you? What kind of load times are you getting? Also, there are many factors why the page is so big and we'll be fixing a bunch of them over time (not super high priority though unless the site is really slow for a majority of our users).

ASP.NET IDs get huge the further down controls get embedded. We're going to do some changes in our base controls that should shrink those considerably.
Telerik's editor seems to add a lot to the page. Anywhere you can reply in the site we render the text editor (even if you never hit reply or new thread). In the future, we'll probably rig it to lazy load instead so the total size of the page goes down for those just reading.
Lots of AJAX code at the bottom of the page. We have a big custom control library. This allows us to never ever use UpdatePanels and have every single request be big and pass view state around even if we don't need it. The side effect is a bunch of initialization code (that can't really be crunched [whitespace can be crunched, but not variable names]). Not sure there's much we can do about this except continue to evolve our controls and how they talk to each other and possibly move it out to a dynamic js file that gets cached.

We're quite agile now that the base platform is there so we will continue to evolve it (unlike the old C9).

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Christian Liensberger — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:53:20 GMT

Interesting :) Thanks for the feedback.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Sven Groot — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:52:42 GMT

It is marginally faster but not much, and it's only faster since you added the non-ajax initial page load (I have quite high latency to the US so the amount of requests is more important than the size).

It's still much slower to actually use the forums than in v3 because there's no way to jump to a specific page or to jump to the first unread post in a thread.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Christian Liensberger — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:51:41 GMT

To reply to myself: it also happens when you scroll down a little bit in the threads overview (in the forum view), click on one of the threads, let it load and then click on the back button of the browser (IE7 in my case). The forum view gets shown again and a javascript executed that moves the page again back up to the top... kind of annoying.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Erik Porter — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:49:38 GMT

The new site is much faster than the old one. We will continually work on performance (page size, etc) as we have time in parallel with new features.

And no, I've noticed that too lately. That is a bug that has somehow creeped in the last few weeks (wasn't there when we launched). We're looking into it.

Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Christian Liensberger — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:49:25 GMT

Cool! I knew it... the stuff IS coming! :)

Re: Re: Re: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

me — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:49:18 GMT