...more recent posts
Tom was asking me about the behavior of the system when switching (in [editpage]) between the different commenting styles. This prompted me to rethink how this works. I had never really played around with it too much. Yet again, the incomparable value of having other people actually use the code you are writing.
Anyway, I've made some changes to the comment pages. The default behavior is to allow for comments to be added either flush left (not indented) after any comments that are already there, or directly under (and indented) any particular comment. The 'add a comment' link at the top of the page (or if it exists, the actual posting box at the bottom of the page) will always give you the first behavior. When it's allowed, clicking the [add a comment] link after a specific comment will put your follow up comment right under the one whose link you clicked (and indented.)
Anyway, the page owner can always switch back and forth between styles of comments (either straight, or allowing this indenting.) But if you already had indented comments on your page, then switching to straight (non-indented) comments would loose any old comments that were indented. Well, they wouldn't be lost, but they wouldn't display.
Anyway, to get to the point. I've changed things so now if you change a page that already has indented comments to the straight style it will "flatten" any indented comments (un-indent them) so that everything displays.
I am very happy about this. The reason is that it is my secret desire to get rid of the indenting comments altogether. While I agree that it is nice to have options, this one is so expensive that I think we'd be better off without it. I won't do anything rash, but over the long haul (and especially if we started to become more busy) I am thinking of eventually loosing this feature. I'll explain the cost if anyone really cares, but take it from me, it's a really high cost (in storage, and processor power) to get the indenting comments to work. If we had a hundred users it might not work out so well (or it might.) A thousand users and I'm pretty sure it would be too much strain. I'd love to find out some day how big this could scale.
Well, I've done a lot of testing and I can't get any of these comment problems to happen again. But I saw some happen yesterday (in the wild, as it were) so I know that something is up. I'll keep looking.
Did somebody say something about having to scroll down on the /settings page before you see any text? That doesn't sound right. Can someone confirm this with browser/OS information?
Does this happen on any other pages?
Thanks.