Also: Just realized comments seem to not appear for a few seconds after posting them, which seems to be the result of one of the performance things that I’ve done. I thought it was fine when I first tried it locally, but the delay is a bit larger on the live server, and so I am probably going to reverse that specific change. I find seeing an empty comment after posting really unsettling and I feel afraid that my content might have been lost or something.
I agree that it’s unpleasantly unsettling. What’s worse is that (for me) after initially posting a comment, at least some of the time its content never appears at all unless I e.g. edit the comment. I guess some timeout is expiring.
If doing this makes things better in some other way, perhaps there’s a way to give a visual indication that what the user is seeing is known not to be up to date but should get refreshed shortly? Depending on what the advantages of the change were, this might be better than just backing it out. Obviously the right thing is to make it so fast that it isn’t an issue at all :-).
[EDITED to add:] To my surprise, I find that if I open another instance of the same page it doesn’t have the newly posted comment on it, but an empty comment just like the original page where I posted it. So I guess it isn’t just a matter of taking time to reload content, but something more complicated. I don’t have a good mental model of what might be happening underneath to produce this effect, but my gut says it probably isn’t a good idea.
(Apologies for the kinda-redundant comment; I wanted to test something that required a new one.) So if I post a comment and then immediately—while it’s showing as an empty comment—close the window, then the thing-showing-as-an-empty-comment still shows up empty in other windows but can be edited and has all its actual content. So I’m guessing there’s some nontrivial rendering process that happens in the background on the server, and until that’s done the “rendered” version of the comment is whatever it used to be, which for a new comment is empty?
If so, then (what I assume to be) the fact that this “rendering” process is slow enough to be worth trying to do in the background seems pretty scary. How can that not be really quick?
The problem is actually not that the rendering itself is not quick. The rendering itself actually takes practically no time. I just looked into it, and the reason this is taking so long is that while the client renders the comment, it actually waits until the next server polling interval (every 20 seconds on production) to display it, which is actually a quite easy-to-fix bug.
Also: Just realized comments seem to not appear for a few seconds after posting them, which seems to be the result of one of the performance things that I’ve done. I thought it was fine when I first tried it locally, but the delay is a bit larger on the live server, and so I am probably going to reverse that specific change. I find seeing an empty comment after posting really unsettling and I feel afraid that my content might have been lost or something.
I agree that it’s unpleasantly unsettling. What’s worse is that (for me) after initially posting a comment, at least some of the time its content never appears at all unless I e.g. edit the comment. I guess some timeout is expiring.
If doing this makes things better in some other way, perhaps there’s a way to give a visual indication that what the user is seeing is known not to be up to date but should get refreshed shortly? Depending on what the advantages of the change were, this might be better than just backing it out. Obviously the right thing is to make it so fast that it isn’t an issue at all :-).
[EDITED to add:] To my surprise, I find that if I open another instance of the same page it doesn’t have the newly posted comment on it, but an empty comment just like the original page where I posted it. So I guess it isn’t just a matter of taking time to reload content, but something more complicated. I don’t have a good mental model of what might be happening underneath to produce this effect, but my gut says it probably isn’t a good idea.
This should be fixed now. Sorry for anyone who felt unsettled by this.
(Apologies for the kinda-redundant comment; I wanted to test something that required a new one.) So if I post a comment and then immediately—while it’s showing as an empty comment—close the window, then the thing-showing-as-an-empty-comment still shows up empty in other windows but can be edited and has all its actual content. So I’m guessing there’s some nontrivial rendering process that happens in the background on the server, and until that’s done the “rendered” version of the comment is whatever it used to be, which for a new comment is empty?
If so, then (what I assume to be) the fact that this “rendering” process is slow enough to be worth trying to do in the background seems pretty scary. How can that not be really quick?
The problem is actually not that the rendering itself is not quick. The rendering itself actually takes practically no time. I just looked into it, and the reason this is taking so long is that while the client renders the comment, it actually waits until the next server polling interval (every 20 seconds on production) to display it, which is actually a quite easy-to-fix bug.