Three ways to get to San José?

January 29, 2008 2:49 PM

Is there any functional difference between Recent Activity, My Comments (tab) and My Comments (link at bottom of page)?

I can't initially seen any differences between the pages these three links (to three different locations) bring up - am I missing something subtle? Otherwise, maybe a little bit of interface rationalisation is in order?

posted by benzo8 to Bugs at 2:49 PM (13 comments total)

Well, "Recent Activity" is editable, and actually shows your comments. So it's pretty obviously not like the others.

I used to win this game when it was on Sesame Street all the time, too.
posted by koeselitz at 2:50 PM on January 29, 2008

The third link is pointing to an old url that forwards to the explicit url for what the first link defaults to; that just need's updating, and I think Matt and pb are working on cleaning up the header/footer stuff a bit so that's probably on the table.

The second link, the My Comments tab on the front page, lists threads in which you've commented in the order of most recent new comment—it's essentially a post-level alternative to the comments-level view of the Recent Activity comments page.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:53 PM on January 29, 2008

We're going to be making the headers/footers so that they're a little more consistent in the near future. For now the My Comments link in the tab shows you threads in that section (I think?) that you have commented in, but only shows the posts. Recent activity is showing you the comments since your comment and is the same as the footer link even though the URL is different. I agree, it's confusing, we have a plan to make it less so and write it all down in the FAQ when we do.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 2:53 PM on January 29, 2008

I'd be happy to remove the My Comments tab on the front page -- it's a holdover from a very old feature I never used personally, and it seems to be confusing people now.

Remove?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:55 PM on January 29, 2008

Cool - thanks guys, for the quick responses, and the assurance that whatever problems we (think we see), you're already on top of it!
posted by benzo8 at 2:56 PM on January 29, 2008

(And seeing as it's effectively a repeat of the information you can achieve from "View All Activity" in your profile, yes, I'd back removing the tab on the front page Matt, to avoid confusion.)
posted by benzo8 at 2:58 PM on January 29, 2008

I cleaned up the footers so they all just say Recent Activity like the header.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 3:03 PM on January 29, 2008

Not only are we beyond the looking glass, we're out of the box, and out of control. ALL LINKS GO TO THE SAME PLACE!
posted by blue_beetle at 3:35 PM on January 29, 2008

My god, it's full of comments.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:08 PM on January 29, 2008

Am I delusional, or did we get an RSS feed for Recent Activity at one point? If I'm delusional, could this be corrected? Uh, by granting this pony, not by drugs or nothin' like that.
posted by desuetude at 12:51 PM on January 30, 2008

I always use the (old) MyComments at the bottom of the page. Maybe I'm dense, but the old MyComments at the bottom and the MyComments on the tab pull up a different view. Nor is All Activity the same as (old) MyComments. So I don't think it's the same. I've actually been going to this thread to click on the old command.
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 9:32 AM on January 31, 2008

Er, never mind, I just figured it out. It's "recent activity" I want.
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 9:33 AM on January 31, 2008

So... I hate to be a jerk, but does anyone else find that using the "remove from activity" link doesn't actually remove the thread?

It doesn't work for me. Maybe there's something I'm doing wrong (clicking?) or it has to do with my platform/browser (OSX Panther/Firefox 2.0.0.11/cookies allowed)

I made the mistake of posting in a US-election-related thread and I fear I'll pay for it until the end of time.
posted by loiseau at 10:41 PM on February 5, 2008