I think the LW user interface in general is pretty terrible and ends up causing a lot of problems. The issue you mention is one of many that I think could use some fixing. The question is, who actually is going to fix it, should it turn out that others agree?
Trn is the best method I know of for organizing long discussions online. The bright green borders for posts added since the last time you refreshed a page are but a faint glimmer of the glories of trn.
Less Wrong would also be much more usable if it had some sort of advanced search. It would be great to be able to search by some combination of posted by, in reply to, boolean string (text with AND, OR, and NOT connectors) [1], links (the hypertext behind the link), and date range. The more posts and comments we accumulate, the more important advanced search becomes.
At this point, I don’t have any way to find old material unless I remember a good bit about it, and it can be hard to find a whole sub-thread, especially if part of it is concealed by a low karma comment or too much depth of comments.
[1] I’m probably missing out on some of the good features in boolean search, but what I describe is at least a start.
LW is an open source project that, in theory, anyone can contribute to. The project is maintained pro bono by Tricycle as a contribution to SIAI. Tricycle maintains a feature tracker somewhere with requests for features/bugfixes, and also accepts code contributions.
On the other hand, it’s been a year and a half since I tried, but when I did, I found the LW code pretty impenetrable—artifacts of its legacy as a Reddit fork.
I think the LW user interface in general is pretty terrible and ends up causing a lot of problems. The issue you mention is one of many that I think could use some fixing. The question is, who actually is going to fix it, should it turn out that others agree?
No kidding ! I still have no idea how to efficiently navigate and search long threads. There doesn’t seem to be a way.
Trn is the best method I know of for organizing long discussions online. The bright green borders for posts added since the last time you refreshed a page are but a faint glimmer of the glories of trn.
Less Wrong would also be much more usable if it had some sort of advanced search. It would be great to be able to search by some combination of posted by, in reply to, boolean string (text with AND, OR, and NOT connectors) [1], links (the hypertext behind the link), and date range. The more posts and comments we accumulate, the more important advanced search becomes.
At this point, I don’t have any way to find old material unless I remember a good bit about it, and it can be hard to find a whole sub-thread, especially if part of it is concealed by a low karma comment or too much depth of comments.
[1] I’m probably missing out on some of the good features in boolean search, but what I describe is at least a start.
LW is an open source project that, in theory, anyone can contribute to. The project is maintained pro bono by Tricycle as a contribution to SIAI. Tricycle maintains a feature tracker somewhere with requests for features/bugfixes, and also accepts code contributions.
On the other hand, it’s been a year and a half since I tried, but when I did, I found the LW code pretty impenetrable—artifacts of its legacy as a Reddit fork.