Hello!

I was posting in the hardware forum the other day and it can be difficult to know what information to include when you're not sure where the problem might be. At the same time it is quite annoying to scroll through posts with hundreds of lines of unnecessary code.

Is it possible to make collapsible parts of a post so you could add output from several commands/files and then people could click on a "plus" next to the filename to see the output if they feel it is relevant?

This would make posts easier to read, and you could add more information without being afraid of scaring people away.

Collapsing is not a bad idea.

Yeah, especially if someone posts their whole syslog on the forum.

I think the quote and code boxes can be collapsible. That would not require much coding. IN fact, I think a tiny bit of Javascript or CSS would do the trick.

I can see the point and usefulness of the idea were it used intellegently.

Most people who post huge amounts of data, do not use the "code" vb code though (which is limited in size already). Instead the post the entire load into the main body of the message.

It strikes me that the idea requires a user to think to use it, and know how to use it best (the title or first line in front of the [+] would need to be informative for eg.) ... users have enough trouble just writing informative titles.

OTOH:
Reverse the idea: expanding boxes...
perhaps a quote or code box could display only the first two or three lines by default... but can be expanded to a popup (say) or just to full length at a click? These boxes then occupy less space.

Doesn't solve the "here is my syslog in the main body" post though.

Maybe the whole post can be optionally made collapsible as well.

Yes this is more or less what I had in mind. I know the boxes are already limited in size, but I would prefer expanding boxes to these minipages that steal the scroll focus when I'm trying to get further down the page

Well, no. You can't guarantee that people will use it, but perhaps if enough people start out more will follow if they like the idea?

Maybe it should just be an extra option in each users options that is disabled by default. Whoever wants to use it enable it.

If you could add this to the bug tracker as a feature request, we'll certainly consider it for a future enhancement. Thanks for the feedback.

--jeremy

I think for posts > a certain word count, you can make it automatically collapsed by displaying just a short summary (or the first few lines). And then give the users to expand it if necessary.

It would avoid a lot of scrolling for huge posts.

Request filed at http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ew&vbug_id=121 feel free to comment or add whatever you think is necessary.

I didn't see your bug so I filed my own (ID 122)... There's no way of removing it? Well I guess the moderators will remove it themselves