See who all are writing replies to a topic

[GaurangTandon]

Ok, so this thread is being stretched in different directions. Let me again detail my point and provide proper explanation:

Why is this feature needed?

Often, I find myself writing a reply and after having reached say 100 words another member posts a reply. So, I lose my energy and valuable time that could have been utilized in answering some other topic.

As you’ll see in Argument Against 2 below, this could be a plug-in or a core feature that can be disabled forum-wide or in specific categories if the forum staff thinks so.

How will it work?

• When you will open the “Reply” dialog box, even before you start typing, you will get this:

see the text near the bottom

that way you will know that someone is working on the topic and you can go and answer any other topic. If you’re really interested in what the other person might post, you can simply set the topic to “Watching” status so you get notified when the reply is psoted.

Argument against 1:

@sam

Unlike “Sam is Typing” that happens in chat, where people go: “Whatever I don’t care all white boxes must be filled with text” in forums you stop and think… ahhh Sam is already taking care of this so I might as well leave it alone.

But what if “Sam” thought the same about you, now stuff that may have gotten an answer will not.

This won’t happen. I can explain like this:

1. Two persons A and B are online.
2. Person A opens a topic and starts writing a reply.
3. Say 5 seconds later, B reads the topic and launches the “Reply” dialog box but hasn’t yet written anything.
4. B will see the small text near the bottom saying that A is working on this topic. But, since B hasn’t started writing, A will not see that B is working on the topic.
5. So, while B will leave the topic so that A can answer it, A will not leave the topic because he never came to know that any body else started writing.
6. Even if B started writing:
   • As soon as B realizes that A is typing and B deletes all what he had written/closes the tab/navigates to another webpage, the notice for A that “B is typing…” will disappear, since B really did stop writing.
   • (I think there is a very low probability of this ever happening, because most of the time B will leave, but I got to cover all the cases) A might wonder why is B writing? So, he can just PM him or chat on Babble.

Argument against 2:

@cpradio

In a Discussion Platform, you want as many voices as you can get, you don’t want people to back off because a staff member is typing up a reply too, or another person who is more experienced. You want everyone’s opinion, even if it is very similar to what someone else wrote.

You made a good point. But not all sites that use Discourse are there to discuss things. While there are discussion sites like this, many sites like Codecademy use it to provide a suppot portal kind of experience where one user question has a particular definitive answer. In that case, even if multiple users type replies - they are bound to be the same thing.

Argument against 3:

@TechnoBear

Just speaking for SitePoint, we get a lot of CSS questions, for example, which can be solved multiple ways. Having several different members offering slightly different solutions is actually more beneficial than only allowing one reply.

@Mittineague

And not only CSS and not always different solutions. But said differently.

I don’t know how this got conveyed to you, but I never intended to say that I want replies from other people to be prevented. As I said before, when you’ll see that other person is working on a reply, then you can always set that topic to “Watching” (and till the time inspect other topics) and when the other person posts his reply and you think that no this isn’t satisfactory then you can always add your own reply next to it. Remember that the notice is a polite “n users writing” not “YOU CAN’T PROCEED BECAUSE N USERS ARE WRITING”

Argument against 4:

It will eat up bandwidth

Discourse already has real time notifications for likes, replies, etc. I don’t know how much bandwidth will be eaten due to a text less than 50 characters long.

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Now, please stick to this format while providing any argument against this feature proposal. Thanks!

@sam Please provide your feedback on this improved version of the feature.