We should collapse excerpts by default on mobile

UX
1

I just added 2 site settings to control the excerpt behavior for pins.

show excerpt on pinned topics in mobile view

and

show excerpt on pinned topics in desktop view

I noticed (and many others have mentioned) that as anon the front page on mobile in many of our sites only has room for a very small amount of topics.

My change did not touch defaults. However I feel that on mobile we should default to suppressing excerpts on pins:

  • The misalignment due to suppressed avatar makes stuff play tricks with my OCD.
  • If you have 3 pinned topics all you see on front page is 3 pinned topics
  • Anon (which is the lions share of traffic) can not unpin
  • Some sites don’t even desire the auto unpin function

Thoughts?

8 Likes
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I’ve kept a note about this in the back of my head as well. :thumbsup: good change!

In the long term, I’d like to challenge the concept of “pinned topics”. I find them to be in my way a bit too often. Reddit opts for an informative sidebar:

Screen Shot 2016-07-12 at 12.16.40.png1640Ă—1066 145 KB

Not really looking to have a discussion about it right now. Just something to ponder.

1 Like
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The idea is that people read it to the bottom, then by default it is auto-unpinned. I don’t see a huge problem with the status quo at the moment, though I agree it sucks to be anon in this case.

We could hold an anon cookie to clear the pinned topics later but that feels like a complex change?

It also seems you have beef with the categories page – where excerpts are expanded by default on mobile which I agree is weird – but what is shown above is 100% latest page.

3 Likes
4

I also have a beef with category page, but this is unrelated to this beef.

4 Likes
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