Hovering over topic - first post summary

Feature
1

Any chance of getting a on hover effect (a href alt text) of first post content to get a feel for what a topic is about without having to enter it? Maximum size restriction of course, say 250…500 characters.

5 Likes
2

Will have to be post v1, we don’t want to ship this extra information with actual page payload, it would inflate page weight and make the queries more expensive.

So ideally we would have to ask for the data on hover (in batches - 5 above - 5 below)

Also note, in general we avoid hover stuff in most spots cause there is no analogue for touch devices, however I think this case is fine.

3

I suspect you could handle this pretty neatly with cached text on the server and using your ajaxy magic as people move around the screen and highlight things. Normally hover preview doesn’t show up for 2-3 seconds of hovering over an item (so as to not be incredibly annoying as your paging around)

This should be pretty light in the grand scheme of things, like loading an extra post [well, the raw text of the post, so no user data]. If you go based on the lastest topics you would also have exponential dropoff as I doubt most people load too far in to the past in most cases. (have the recent items cached json, then after 2-3 page loads require a new fetch which you can cache for x period of time before discarding if you’re low on server resources)

4

I actually have begun to really object to lots of hover behaviors. For example half the time on GMail I have a random “JOE SMITH USER” card open because my mouse just happened to hover over that at the time I was doing other things in another window nearby.

Since hovers have no analog on touch devices, and very few people ever ask for this, I don’t see a lot of value in spending any time on it.

(we actually had first post hover behaviors like this early in Discourse and dropped it… nobody seemed to care.)

2 Likes
5

We still maintain tooltip behavior when you hover over avatars, the idea here would be to yank in the title attribute, not do a full blown hover like we did in the past and just rely on browser. That is much less oppressive. Something like what StackOverflow do with sane newline behavior.

7

Tooltip newlines behavior is radically different from browser to browser, unfortunately.

8

So? Strip newline and just force raw text blob. The feature is to spot content, not read the fancy post. The goal is check the first few sentences and get a feel for the discussion topic to see if you want to read more. Think newspaper summary.

Also, no side fly in stuff that franks talking about, that would be extremely distracting over a normal tool tip where you’re mouse is.

2 Likes
9

Wouldn’t the hover analog in mobile be the literal hover gesture. …? On androids there’s a setting in your phone.

I think the feature is called air view.

1 Like
10

Air View is specific to a select few Samsung devices. For all practical purposes, hover does not exist on mobile.

2 Likes
11

Can make it optional in user profile to avoid bloating the page with something users didn’t want.

Making a hover popup with the OP is pretty simple though, took all of 30 minutes for me to make a functional one that reads from existing JSON via AJAX. Mine was a greedy load though, you could do it where it only loads on demand to lessen the impact. Add another hour or so of effort and it should be as passable as anything else.

I’m a big fan of hovering the topic to show OP preview. Lots of times the title looks promising but the content is garbage, or they didn’t bother with a good title but the post content is interesting. In a small forum where you can read every post, it’s not really needed because you’re going to read everything anyway… but head over to the diablo3 forums or somewhere with hundreds of new topics per day. Having a hover preview is very nice there.

1 Like
12

We don’t mind a PR that implements this provided:

  1. No extra page weight only triggered on hover
  2. On hover it grabs a batch (15 before 15 after) so you don’t issue too many requests.
  3. It uses standard “title” no custom UIs (which always had issues)
  4. It should tooltip the location it would take you to not the first link.
3 Likes
13

I really find it useful to have a way of reading content without leaving the topics list page.
What about of promoting the hovering to a full-featured button, like an eye or a lens?

It would prevent too much dynamism.

Clicking the eye:

2 Likes
14

This is implemented as a plugin here:

4 Likes