Triggered by <http://groupserver.org/r/post/4IZ10B5Fz0Qr54xKy3h3Ir> and
the desire to have some fun figuring out some UI text, Michael and came
up with the ideas below.
Your comments welcome.
Dan
. . .
Rest of post
Currently
---------
On the Topic and Post pages, the disclosure showing that some of a post
has been hidden has no text. Only the "▶" or "▼" is shown. This is
inconsistent with other disclosures and may cause some people to miss
the hidden text in the (somewhat rare) cases where it is actually useful.
Goals
-----
Reduce the impact of false positives.
Minimise unnecessary opening of the disclosure.
Discourage bottom-quoting.
Criteria
--------
Clearly communicate that hidden text is present (when closed) or below
(when open). (We can not currently show a different text when the
disclosure is open).
Do not attempt to explain why the post is disclosed as that is too hard.
Do not imply that the remaining text is worth reading.
Candidates
----------
Bottom Quoting (jargon)
Hidden Text (plain, lies when when open)
More… (common, implies useful text)
Auto-hidden text (jargon)
Continued… (common, works open, implies useful text)
Continues… (works open, implies useful text)
Remainder (slightly pejorative, polysyllabic)
Remainder of post (slightly pejorative, polysyllabic)
Rest of post (only very slightly pejorative, clear)
Rest of the post (good but doesn't need the second "the" especially if
we make the other references to posts consistent)
The rest of the post (way too long)
Google Groups use "show quoted text" and "hide quoted text". We could
just use "quoted text". This is jargon. It may discourage excess
quoting. It lies when it is a false positive or a signature.
Decision
--------
Change "Share:" to "Share post:"
Change "Hide" to "Hide post"
Change "▶" to "▶ Rest of post"
Make the disclosure not black (except on colour-is-for-happy-people; it
already is on some of our site skins).
I like the proposed change and the rationale.
We don't have any stats on use of the > do we?
In post-mockup.png below I show a mock-up of what a post would look like with
the new text. As Dan said¹, we are planning to change the share box, the hide
button, and the disclosure button.
We do not have any statistics on the use of the disclosure button in posts. It
is implemented entirely using JavaScript, and it does not interact with the
server so we have nothing to record. I hope to change the system so the rest of
the post is loaded using AJAX². If we did this then we have a chance of
crawling the server-logs and generating statistics about its use³. As most
people use email most of the time I suspect the disclosure does not get used
much.
*Footnotes*
1. Dan's post <http://groupserver.org/r/post/7CAm0woLWGfh8YuVZy8ghW>
2. Ticket 456: Load Email Remainder using Ajax
<https://projects.iopen.net/groupserver/ticket/456>
3. We could also create a badge for people that view the rest of the
post. Something like “*Treasure* *Hunter* You have explored the
depths of a post trying to find a gem amongst the dross.”
<https://projects.iopen.net/groupserver/ticket/670>
The
following file was added to this topic:
Hi all,
I have pushed up a new version of the Post code that adds some text to the
"Rest of post" button. You can try it out by editing "versions.cfg" so the line
for "gs.group.messages.post" looks like the following:
gs.group.messages.post = 1.0-20110928005753-1d1630bc7b78
After you have done that you will need to rebuild your system
./bin/buildout -N
Finally, you will need to restart your system.
❧
I did not change the Share code, because it is used for topics, images and
posts. I will need to do some work to make it work in all three places.
