Topic on Talk:LiquidThreads 3.0/Design

I looked at this version of the redesign plans. These are my comments. They are currently incomplete.

Mechanics

Scrollable table of contents

My primary concern with a scrollable table of contents is that when scrolling from the top of the page to the bottom, a user can get "trapped" in the top part and never be able to scroll down below the table of contents. Users already sometimes have this issue with textareas on the edit screen.

Questions

• Will there be any mechanism to mitigate the risk of users getting "trapped" in the table of contents area?

Hovering

While hovering works nicely on platforms that support mice or cursors, some mobile platforms (the iPhone in particular) don't really support hover capability.

Questions

• Will clicking these items that are intended to be hovered over have the same effect?

Design

Dismissible pop-ups

Screenshots such as File:LQT-v2-Polling-Error.png, File:LQT-v2-Editor-LoginPrompt.png, and File:LQT-v2-Editor-Reply.png all use words in the top-right corner to dismiss or cancel the pop-up, rather than an icon.

Questions

• Is this deliberate?
• Are there concerns about other languages using longer words?
• Wouldn't an "x" icon of some kind be easier to implement?

Replies

Screenshots such as File:LQT-v2-Editor-Reply.png show no "show preview" button.

Questions

• Is the lack of a "show preview" button deliberate?

Headline links

In screenshots such as File:LQT-v2-Summary-Prompting.png, there are a number of links ("watch this topic", "move", etc.) in the top-right that look cluttered and have been discussed previously.

Questions

• Are there plans to address these links in some way?

Dual control bars

The dual control bars are described in the redesign plans, but not justified.

Questions

• Are there particular reasons for including the control bar twice?
• Will it be possible to disable one of these two control bars in user preferences (to save screen real estate, for example)?

System behavior

Automatic polling

While I think automatic polling is a feature, some users are going to want to be able to disable this. On slow connections, it can cause serious performance issues. Otherwise services such as Google Instant will automatically disable polling if it senses that the connection is slow and allows users to disable the polling altogether.

The polling behavior is currently planned to display a pop-up when it disables. I view this as intrusive and unnecessary. Many users keep multiple tabs open at a given time, meaning that this message could quickly become a serious nuisance.

Questions

• Will there be a user preference to disable polling?
• Will the polling have connection speed detection?
• Will the notification that polling has stopped be disableable?

As one of those people with a slow connection, I heartily endorse MZMcBride's last point about Automatic polling. Quite apart from the "performance issues" of slow page loading, I strongly suspect that polling for dynamic updates is what has made Liquid Threads to consistently crash my browser. However, when I previously raised the issue of allowing users to disable this, it was met with thought-terminating clichés about "crappy" preferences and "anal" users, so I don't expect much accommodation for those of us who have limited bandwidth available.

Ningauble, there's little use in commenting LQT plans now, LQT is dead and LQT 3 will never be produced. Anyway, yes, LQT can crash your browser: don't keep pages with LQT indefinitely open in your tabs.