Extended new comment Show Pony

July 11, 2018 12:01 PM

Currently for a limited period of time if a new comment(s) are posted to a thread you have open one gets a notification "Foo new comments, show". My understanding is this feature is time limited because it loads the server by regularly checking for new comments since the last displayed (hence the reason one sometimes sees the notice "0 new comments, show"). After the limited time period one gets the message "No recent updates. Reload to check for new comments". Here's the pony request: Would it be possible to have a link in the last statement that manually runs the new comment check code and then displays an appropriate message if new comments are found?

The reason I'd ride this pony every day is I have pretty poor internet at work and sometimes a page load for the big threads times out before it completes but the new comment load is small and quick. Being able to just load the new comments (if there are any) would be preferable to reloading the whole thread.

posted by Mitheral to Feature Requests at 12:01 PM (6 comments total)

Good idea and shouldn’t be too hard to add. I’ll see what I can do.
posted by frimble (staff) at 12:03 PM on July 11, 2018 [6 favorites]

hence the reason one sometimes sees the notice "0 new comments, show"

ISTR that the strange "0 new comments" notice happens when a comment has been added but then subsequently deleted. (I just got one on the politics megathread.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 12:13 PM on July 11, 2018 [2 favorites]

Yeah, that's correct about '0 new' indicating there was one but it got deleted.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 12:15 PM on July 11, 2018

there was one but it got deleted.

“Those comments? We don’t talk about those comments.”

Great suggestion!
posted by Celsius1414 at 1:44 PM on July 11, 2018

If the checking for new comments were entirely manual and never automatic, I would be 100% OK with that, too. You know, if it's a significant drag on server resources.
posted by dbx at 2:01 PM on July 12, 2018

It's definitely not a drag on server resources. The check amounts to a very lightweight query (are there any comments newer than the last comment in this thread) with a reply that's equally light (there are N new comments/there are no new comments). To load those comments, the server builds part of a thread, then your browser takes over to add that bit in at the end. Even with thousands of people having a certain post open, it's orders of magnitude less taxing on the server than were all those people refreshing that post.
posted by frimble (staff) at 2:15 PM on July 12, 2018 [1 favorite]