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BlogSphere - Feature Request: Burger King Response Displays!


This is a big request, and I don't expect it to be done quickly, but the flat display of responses that we see in most blogs really sucks. It's a huge step backward in functionality and ease of use. Even Usenet had threads 20+ years ago, for goodness sake! But on the other hand, 99% of blogs use a flat display and everyone's pretty much used to seeing it that way. What a dilemma!

What I propose is that we deal this dilemma with what I'm calling the Burger King feature. About 20 years ago, the Burger King restaurant chain ran an advertising campaign using the theme "Have It Your Way". If you don't want pickles on your Whopper sandwich, you don't get pickles. Not exactly a new idea, I grant you, but in the fast food industry it was going against the grain by offering... Choice!

So, let's offer choice in Blogsphere, and not just choice on the part of the blog owner. Let's offer choice on the part of the blog reader! I haven't thought this through completely, but here are the major points:

1. We need a response-to-response form.

2. When viewing an entry through its permalink, we need three radio buttons displayed, I say put them between the entry and the responses, but maybe they should be elsewhere. There should be a label that says "Show Responses" and the three radio buttons say "All Reponses - Normal", "All Responses - Indented", and "Hierarchy" The default will be "All Responses - Normal".

3. There should also be a checkbox, placed adjacent to the radio buttons. It is labeled "Remember my selection", and the default will be that the box is unchecked, but it changes to a default of checked and greys out if you select "Hierarchy" (because it makes no sense to be looking at responses one at a time, click on the thread map, and forget that you're looking at them one at a time).

4. There should be a cookie that remembers the radio button setting if the checkbox is checked.

5. If you have chosen "All Responses - Normal", you will see responses and response to response docs, in date-time order. The usual "@" and a number reference will be automatically pre-pended to any response-to-responses that are displayed. You will see the usual "Add Your Comments" form at the bottom of the page, but there will also be hotspots labeled "Respond to this comment" displayed with each individual comment entry. This will bring you to display of just that one comment document for the particular response -- which will have the response-to-response form embedded.

6. If you have chosen "All responses - Indented", it's basically the same as the flat version, but with the responses shown in hierarchical order instead of date-time order, and with indentation to show structure.

7. If you have chosen "Hierarchical"... well, to be honest, I'm not sure what you should see? Just the thread map for the whole set of responses and responses to responses? All the responses to the post itself, with thread maps displayed for each? Once you click on a response-to-response entry in the thread map, I think you should just see that response and the map of its subthread, along with the form for doing a response-to-response.

-rich



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You can use the rich text editor for rich text formating. You can also enter HTML to embed objects, e.g. to embed a YouTube video or a screenshot of the project. In this case use '[' and ']' to mark the passthrough HTML as such.

Please note that the first time you use the new UI your description is converted from rich text to MIME. You might want to copy and paste the raw plain text from the old UI in the new UI so that you don't loose information.