Recently some forum posts have started being automatically collapsed and require clicking a button to display the rest of. This is extremely annoying. Please add an option to disable it.
This is part of an as-yet-unannounced (and perhaps not even here to stay) feature that the mods are currently discussing and testing. I’m not going to add a config option for it, but I am working on the styling to make it clear what is happening. (It is showing 1-2 posts at the top of each page of the thread as a sort of “accepted answer” feature.)
That seems useful in some circumstances, but it’s pretty unhelpful when I want to read through all the posts in a thread. I don’t want to have to click “expand post” over and over.
So @IsaacKing, the feature that I mentioned is now live: The reason you were seeing this is because I was showing the Original Post and the “Accepted Answer” at the top of each page of the thread, and because if those posts were very long, I didn’t want to create a huge amount of scrolling just to get to the “new content” of the thread. See Pinned [O] Post for discussion of that feature.
Since your post here, though, I have changed it to only show the Original Post if there is also an Accepted Answer. So you won’t see these collapsed posts on every thread, only ones which have an accepted answer - and there, the intent is to set off the OP and the Answer from the rest of the thread, to clearly show the former as the context of the latter. I’ll be the first one to admit that my user interface design skills are…non-existent, so I’m open to other suggestions - or even better, volunteers - to make it better.
Now that this is all officially deployed, do you still think that collapsing the OP and the Accepted Answer on the second, third etc pages of the thread is a bad idea? Is there a better way that we can display this information to make it more intuitive what’s going on?
Do you have a way of detecting how someone accesses the second+ page on a forum? For a user who accesses a subsequent page by navigating from the previous one, i.e. someone who is reading the thread chronologically from beginning to end, auto-collapsing the original post and accepted answer on subsequent pages would be a useful convenience to avoid excess scrolling.
On the other hand, someone who accesses a non-first page directly, either from an external link or in my case usually by clicking on one of the “recent forum topics” on the home page of judge apps, would probably appreciate seeing the original post and accepted answer in full at the top of the page.
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I believe adding a query string to the URL when clicking on a link in the page navigation pane can make this possible.
This:
Each of those is a hyperlink, and concatenating “&navigation=true” to the URL shouldn’t be a problem.
It has to be removed from the URL after it’s processed and the page is loaded, though, in case someone copies the URL from the address bar to post it elsewhere.