Greetings, Cranky Users! I had been intending to talk about photos today, but the week got away from me. Since I am out of town next Friday, and Fridays are a good day to play with formatting, I guess we'll leave the photo discussion until... Ooooh. April Fools' Day? We'll see. But meanwhile, do this: go to this great diary by fiver and hotlist it. Some of it is stuff we've discussed here before, and some is new, but it's a very helpful collection that you'll be glad to be able to find again.
So, let's just have a cranky little chat about comments. The [new] flag, the expanding and shrinking and hiding, that sort of thing.
In elfling's recent diary, the inimitable rs joined the comment thread for a while to address questions and complaints. One such complaint was about the loss of "story only" as an option to view a given diary without showing the comments. Even rs, not having been on the design team, doesn't know why that feature was removed. But there are two workarounds, neither of which addresses every issue.
One is, you can go into your profile as above, right under the box for your sig, and change the comment display mode to "hide" (and click SAVE!) This changes the default behavior for all diaries, so you won't like it if you use this only in a limited way (only on your smartphone, for instance). Of course you can select "hide" for the specific viewing of a specific diary, under Comment Preferences just above the comment section, but by that time, you'll have had to sit through loading the comments once. And you can use the mobile app on your smartphone, or not log in, each of which may have its own drawbacks.
An important comment by rs explained why the [new] flags are so cranky. In order to avoid bringing performance to its knees, or lower, Daily Kos doesn't actually track when you've viewed every single comment individually. It's using diary refresh times as a proxy for that:
When you change the comment display mode using the comment control bar in a diary, you are actually reloading all of the comments for that story, and we're counting it as you loading the diary for purposes of comment-newness, and updating your diary-load-timestamp accordingly.
I urge you to read his whole comment, because it explains much about the way comment "newness" behaves.
But what about a situation where you want to send someone outside of Daily Kos a link to a DK diary, but don't want to clutter up what you're trying to say by having them see the comments? There is a decent workaround for that, and it involves adding a parameter to the url. At the end of the url, there can be a portion that starts with ?. It's called the query string, and it allows you to pass information to the website that you're linking to, which it will then do something with. In our case, it will use the information to tell how to display the linked diary.
So, assuming your url doesn't already have a part that begins with ?, if you add ?detail=hide to the end, your link will go to the diary with its comments hidden. (Don't use this within the site, in a comment or the like, because it will override users' preferences and they'll be mad!) If there is already a ? section, change your added part to &detail=hide and add it to the end. (Note: if ?showAll=yes or &showAll=yes is in your query string already, it will kill your poor little detail=hide. You'll need to remove showAll=yes. Just paste your detail=hide in place of showAll=yes, leaving the ? or & there at the front of detail=hide.)
This comment by rs gives a full account of using the detail= parameter, and notes that it is not a totally official site feature and he is making no guarantee that it will work permanently the way it does now. I think that's fair. We thank rs for the help, and share his hope that something like the "story only" option will be added in the future.
WHERE TO TURN
☀ For more stuff sort of like this, the Cranky Users group.
☀ For lots of official detail about the site and its workings, the DK4 FAQ (frequently-asked questions).
☀ The main FAQ is still here.
☀ To report something not working to the dev team, the bug report form, whose link I cannot get to embed, possibly because it's https. The url to copy/paste is:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dGN4cDVvNl9LR1pxYjdTSmNMNm5HRVE6MQ#gid=0
A bug report will not be directly responded to, but will be kept on file by the development team until the issue is resolved or otherwise closed.
☀ To get immediate response for technical help or urgent site problems, the contact form (be sure to select the tech support radio button). A tech support request will get prompt response, but does not get added to the bug report database. If you use it to report a known bug, you'll be told it's a known bug, and that's it.
☀ For immediate catharsis, complain in a Cranky Users thread. These threads are regularly scanned by kos and developers, but it's not a guaranteed way to bring an issue to the attention of these folks. There's much to read here, and that's understandably not their big focus. But sometimes you just need some sympathy from other cranky people!
Our thanks to kos, the development team, and the Dkosopedia contributors for their vigorous efforts to deliver a site that works well and to help us know how to work it. Even though we're cranky, we really do know it's a huge job. (Right, Crankies?)
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