Comment Subject removed in prototype

I prefer option #1: removal of comment subjects.

- From a usability perspective, the notion of a comment having a "subject" or "title" is very strange. Every time I add a comment to a Drupal site that has such comments enabled, I have to pause for a moment and think: "How can I summarize my comment in a just a few words?" Leaving that field blank causes Drupal to auto-populate it with the first few words of the comment body, which looks sloppy and fragmented. Many d.o and g.d.o also hold this field in low regard, as evidenced by such dismissive subject lines as "..." or "=-=".

- Adding a "link to this comment" feature is very, very easy. We simply need to add an absolute link to the comment's $links variable. (I can extend the Permalink module to add this feature to comments.)

- Data migration won't be trivial, but it's not nearly as difficult as many aspects of migration we've already committed to. By checking if the subject is equivalent to the first X words or characters of the comment body, we know the title is auto-populated, so it can be ignored. If a user added a unique subject, we can prepend it to the comment as a header, span, or bolded text.

Option #1 will pretty majorly break the issue queues. :( Tons of comments refer to other comments by number. You'll find probably thousands of comments that look like:

I think the patch in #17 is the way to go, #15 is flawed because of XYZ

Plus, the issue link filter lets you link directly to specific comments, e.g.:

#430994-1: Comment Subject removed in prototype

Gives you:
#430994-1: Comment Subject removed in prototype

Which actually links to:

http://drupal.org/node/430994#comment-1464494

I suppose we could special-case this for comments on issues. I don't care as much about titles for comments in forum posts and other places. Generally, I tend to like them, but that might just be because that's what I'm used to. But, I know they're pretty critical for the comments on issues.

I propose including legacy support for comment numbers or dww's suggestion that comments on issue queues be non-threaded (i.e., flat, non-indented) and numbered. Threaded issue queues could get crazy.

Issue queues are definitely staying unthreaded. That's not up for debate. I'm just talking about the comment "titles" which are really just the per-issue comment number and permalink. I think they need to stay.

I'm fine with special-casing issue nodes for this if that's the only node type where we want these comment subjects going forward.

That said, I think I agree with courtney:

- the data migration is going to be a pain

- this page is pretty hard to follow: http://theming.dosprint.org/sfsprint/node/347419 -- i think titles would help a lot to visually separate comments from each other. It's currently just a soup of text with mostly the same font and size...

- supporting titles only on legacy nodes seems weird -- people are going to be confused as to why certain comments have titles and other don't.

- permalinking from the title seems intuitive and less cluttered than a separate "link to this" link on each comment

I've always found it annoying that comments have a subject/title, thought I agree that the data migration might be tricky since some people actually use the subject. The prototype on the page furniture page at http://infrastructure.drupal.org/drupal.org-style-guide/page_furniture.html looks ok to me without subjects, but I think that the presence of the users' picture helps to make it obvious when a new comment starts. I'm not sure how we're planning to handle the majority of users who don't have pictures, so comments may tend to blend together more and the subject, or at least better styling, would be needed.

I'm with dww that the "subject" of issues should remain a number.

This might be a silly question, but... why do we need to do data migration? Why is that even desirable? My comment subjects are usually summaries of the post or something snarky. They weren't intended to be part of the comment body, or else I would've put them in the comment body and let Drupal do an auto-title for me.

Let's examine the most recent "hot button" thread on the forums: http://drupal.org/node/418560

Just skipping around, since there are like 300 comments, I don't see any titles there that say something their comment bodies don't say. And in fact, on almost all of them, moving the title to the body would make no sense:

http://drupal.org/node/418560#comment-1423412 would turn into "re: Wordpress For all those wondering..."
http://drupal.org/node/418560#comment-1426634 would turn into "Usability Studies Mark and Leisa...."
http://drupal.org/node/418560#comment-1452882 would turn into "_ Oh darn it, why not.." :P

I think doing some sort of migration like this is a horrible idea and would lead to rampant confusion. Just hide the comment subjects on threaded comments (not unthreaded, like issue queues), per the mocks. If we decide that we hate it, we can design a nice way to present H2s, and then just edit a theme template file and put them back.

Also, I should point out that I don't think http://theming.dosprint.org/sfsprint/node/347419 is a good way to bolster your argument since the pictures are missing, and that's the central thing that makes the comments easy to scan. The lack of a permalink is true, but just make the date the permalink and stick the comment id on the image (granted, it won't look like a link which is annoying, but neither do our current permalinks, so this isn't really a net loss).

@webchick in #6: Some people essentially start their comment with the subject. For example, http://groups.drupal.org/node/7850#comment-23746 would not make a lot of sense if the subject were removed. Granted, that's not on d.o proper, but I'm sure people do the same thing on d.o. Whether or not it is common enough to try data migration (which, I agree, would not have great results in a lot of places) or keep the subject, I'm not sure.

Just adding in that this was discussed with Mark in Drupalcon DC. He said that (as you can see) the comments appear only on the Druplicon appreciation page and that was thrown in with probably no usability testing pretty late in the redesign. So people basically did not have much chance to discuss/test that. So that comments have no subjects there is not a hard indication of anything.

Yeah, I'm not sure. Looks like catch does the same at http://groups.drupal.org/node/7850#comment-34388.

Honestly though, I think re-training a few dozen people is going to be less work in the end than un-screwing-up 400,000 comments from people who understood subject and comment to be separate entities, not one and the same.

Cross-posted with Gábor.

Ok, cool. If Mark is not like OMG THIS IS THE CENTRAL FOCUS PIECE then I think it's fine to keep the subject field. :) Just please, please, PLEASE don't try and "help" by doing data migration on this information.

That is all. :D

That screenshot just shows a nice even progression of 1 nesting level per comment for 3 comments in a single thread. Please try it on real forum topics where you can get lots of different comments at the same level, even within a nested thread. Even assuming everyone has a picture (or the default "you haven't uploaded a picture" picture), I don't think that's going to visually separate the comments from each other enough...

I think that the borders on the comments are helpful to tell them apart.

Subjects for forum posts are annoying. The numbered subjects on the issue queues are pretty helpful.

Clearly, this needs a design review input.

I'm putting my vote towards retaining titles. I think an h4 should be just enough. We'll likely need a mockup.

Subject lines make sense where there is a "collapsed" view. Collapsed views generally come in two flavors: either all comments are collapsed and thread-indented. Or only certain comments are collapsed that appear under some sort of 'threshold'. The threshold is generally set based on either

1) "popularity" of a response (aka, the slashdot model) or
2) by depth in the tree (how many parents a given comment has) or
3) by age (how recent or old the comment was posted).

Handling the functionality of how to expand/contract comments also comes in various flavors. One suggestion would be to use jquery extensively to have usable defaults with nice 'roll-down' effect to expand them (either one by one, or a collapse/expand all button.

For usability, all comments get printed out in the raw html, but certain ones (provided a user has javascript enabled) are collapsed by default.

Edit: I guess this is somewhat off topic. But I'm also arguing for a way to make subject line work for the new design, since its already been reasoned out above why comment subjects should stick around. Granted, the collapsible feature could have its own thread.

Filing this issue into the new Blue Cheese project.

Marked #790002: No comment permalinks (which was created as a critical bug) duplicate with this. Upgrading priority accordingly.

Also marked #881742: Clean up issue queue design duplicate. The masses are getting restless. Can some of the theme team please put some energy into resolving this ASAP? Thanks!

Do simply add the comment subject, so we have the content of today's Drupal.org and typography from the redesign.