"Load Next" and "Load Previous"

In version 10.X, when using a link directly to a forum reply (such as from an email alert), you will often see multiple "load previous" links above the reply, and multiple "load next" links below the reply. Based on information from Telligent's developers, we understand that this is working as designed, but we have some concerns:

1) Most of the time, the links/buttons do nothing; clicking them just makes them go away and no additional content is loaded. Why display them, if there is no content to load? Telligent says this is WAD and is not receptive to making a change.

2) In cases where the links do load additional content, they tend to cause confusion. First, the default link is not obvious and very easily overlooked. We made a change to the site to make them colored and more obvious, but this still leads to confusion when the person reading the thread does not realize that there are more replies. 

3) Even if the person reading the thread notices the "load next" / "load previous", its extra clicks and work needed to just read the discussion. We were told how this is mainly due to performance concerns with very long threads, but this behavior occurs regardless of the size/length of the thread. There should be a way to always display all content (no load next/previous links) for threads under a certain number of replies for example, but Telligent has not been receptive to any changes.

Does anyone else on 10.X share these concerns?

Thanks,

Jesse

Parents Reply Children
  • I see the release notes here, but no mention on load next/previous. Is it this?

    Improved Threaded Comment and Forum Replies User Experiences

    • Accurate view more indicators when viewing comments and replies.

    Some visuals would be good here, if there is an expanded version of the release notes in the works.

  • Yes, that is the reference. There are several associated improvements in 10.2:

    View More buttons

    On both forum and comment threads, the "load next/previous" (now labeled "View More") buttons are accurate. The platform APIs for loading threaded replies, especially contextual replies related to deeply nested permalinked replies, were completely reworked to include accurate data about the number of siblings (both physical reply siblings as well as effective siblings due to flattening configuration) in each direction (up or down) from a reply. This enables the UI to provide accurate "View More" buttons only when there are more to be viewed instead of its previous behavior where it would often not accurately know and leave the user to find out on her own by clicking.

    Permalink Context

    Permalinked replies were the most obvious pain point, and they were not just an edge case, as they are used when navigating to a reply from an email or notification. When navigating to a permalinked reply, Community previously would include either the first full page of threaded replies if the permalinked item was contained within, or otherwise only include the permalinked item's ancestry tree up to the root, along with often-ambiguous "Load More" buttons at each level. With 10.2, all permalinked replies always include the full first page of threaded replies for more context, even if the permalinked item would not have been contained within that set. And whether it is or not, the permalinked item's own contextual ancestry is merged into the first page of replies and the reply's first page of children for even greater context. This is in concert with the aforementioned, accurate, "View More" buttons at every level to provide more, and better, context on permalinks.

    New Reply Indicators

    On Forum Threads, Community would previously show temporary new reply indicators (color bars) if they were received while viewing the page. With 10.2, this is still the case, but those bars also temporarily appear on all new replies since last visiting a thread, whether the replies were received while viewing the thread or not. The display duration for the indicator is configurable in the Forum Thread widget.

    Updated UI

    The user interface of the "Load More" buttons has been updated to be more pronounced with large buttons that span the width of the reply, and labels that simply say "View More" with accurate arrow icons. This is possible since there is no longer an excess of inaccurate "Load More" indicators that would have been too visually noisy at that scale. The bold buttons also aid with visibility of new inline "View More" indicators which are used for edge cases where a user may navigate to a very deeply nested permalink that has some of its own immediate parents pre-loaded along with replies close to the root of the page, but with a missing set in the middle (inline) that can be loaded on demand.

    Performance

    The performance of navigating threads has been improved both on both the server and client side.

  • Great, thanks. What version is this community on? (the one I'm replying on) 

  • This all sounds really helpful, and we'll certainly install the update and give it a try. Just to be quite clear, I believe that our users have been facing three issues, although it wasn't always quite clear which one was causing a specific confusion, and it may have been more than one in some cases:

    1. Failing to spot that messages were hidden by Load Next/Previous links - sounds as though this update should really help with this
    2. Variable message sequencing, in particular between viewing a thread "from the top" and entering via a permalink - because many of the people using permalinks are thread participants returning after previously viewing "from the top", the re-ordered conversation is not as they remember it. I understand the arguments for emphasising the permalinked message's parent and children, but this is a side-effect, and it took a lot of working out what was happening.
    3. An apparent weakness (or possibly a designed feature??) in the sequencing algorithm that can lead to some messages being omitted from the thread altogether when the user enters via a permalink. In at least one of our threads, the missing messages reappeared as an accidental side-effect when I changed the nesting depth.

    We may need to run the updated version on our live site for a while before we can see how it works with real conversations. I don't think I'll be able to figure out the effect of always showing the first page fully until I see it.

    Thanks for the information though - we'll look forward to it.

    Regards

  • Failing to spot that messages were hidden by Load Next/Previous links - sounds as though this update should really help with this

    Right, this should be corrected.

    Regarding 2 and 3, a side effect of the the improved way data is loaded for threaded replies and permalink context is gathered should also address edge cases of messages seemingly missing due to position of re-entry via permalink. 

    While 10.2 should make threaded messaging more reliable, it's worth noting that visual threading remains entirely optional. If a community finds it a poor match for their members, both comments and forums can still be flattened via their widgets' configuration.