Sometimes I’ll make or read a comment and want to stay abreast of all the conversation beneath it, including replies to replies and so on. I can obviously manually switch on notifications for each reply as they come in, but an option to do that automatically would be great.
Originally I was going to suggest it just for comments the user posts, but actually being able to switch it on for any comment, in the same way we can for single level notifications now, would make tracking some discussions a lot easier.
I independently thought of the same idea. While I’m daydreaming, I had some extra features that would be useful to me in a dream world:
- It would be good to be able to apply this to posts (that are not mine) as well, or even to a link (i.e. all comments that would show up under the crosspost aggregation feature)
- One problem I have with GitHub is that the subscription list perpetually grows and is never pruned.
- It would be nice if I could make such subscriptions, for instance, automatically expire n days after the last interaction
- Or, if there is a list of subscriptions somewhere, if I could manually “prune all whose last interaction is more than n days”
- I’m not sure what the best UI would be, whether everything should go in notifications, or whether there should be a dedicated view for these subscriptions
- And, should that view show the whole thread underneath the top-level post you subscribed to?
- Or just the “new” comments?
- My feeling is the former, but not sure.
Doable, yep.
The only thing I’m a bit unsure about is the UI part. Currently we have a simple bell or no bell icon which toggles the notification setting. How do we add this functionality while keeping the old one? Toggle between 3 states? Or add (yet another) menu entry to the 3 dot menu?
That’s how GitHub does it (multi status dropdown). It’s not the exact same, but I’d guess it’s a possibility.
I was thinking of a pair of actions to the three dot menu as it’s likely to be a less used feature so doesn’t need to be immediately accesible. One to enable following all replies, and one to disable. I’d make them separate, rather than a toggle, so you can force it on or off on all child comments.
When the user enables the flag, set it and the notify flag on that comment and all its existing children. When the user disables the flag, unset it and the notify flag on that comment and all it’s children. This allows the user to clear the notify flag on any child comments, even if notify all isn’t set.
When a reply is received to a comment with the flag set, set the flag and the notify flag on the new comment.
