New "Live Thread" feature, or whatever it's called
 

I noticed today that while I was looking at a thread a new post being added was detected, and teh page was updated automagically.

After that, the concrete post that had been added started flashing cyclically, fading to white, and making it very hard to read (and in the way, crippling the firefox performance, but I am pretty sure that's firefox's fault as always). I am most concerned about readability.

I'd like to suggest a less aggressive highlighting scheme, some different -but non flashing- color for example.

I greatly appreciate that this forum continues to evolve and has more and more features each day without being a pain to work with. And thank all the staff members for that. I think it's a great idea, I just disagree with a concrete detail of the current implementation that makes it hard to read for me.

Otherwise, kudos for the update ;)

PS. I've just seen another one and it doesn't do the cyclic flash thingie, I don't know if I hit a bug in either the new code or maybe it's my browser acting up. Or if it does only do that under certain conditions.

I've had the same problem yesterday: the flashing page is hard to read. I just reloaded the page and it was displayed normally. If this is the normal behaviour, I think it should be slightly changed, at least by removing the flashing effect.

I don't notice any flashing ... maybe I turned it off in the browser settings.

I noticed it. Thought "WTF is going on now?!?!". :)

It happened one time, then the next time it didn't happen (I just saw the fancy square with a text telling me about the live thread and stuff). I am not sure what the flashing indicates, or if it's just some odd bug that appears only on a certain condition.

Whatever it is, it's quite annoying. Imagine reading Don Quixote on a karaoke with disco music video on the background or something like that :p

It just happened to me with your new post. I barely succeeded in pressing the "quote" button between one flash and another... :(

It does get your attention, I believe I saw some smoke come from my keyboard also.

Thanks for the feedback. The "Live Thread" functionality should be considered ALPHA at this point, which is why I didn't make an announcement (which usually comes at the BETA stage). The flashing is definitely something I plan to get rid of ASAP. If anyone has any additional feedback, I'd appreciate it.

--jeremy

Maybe it's browser-specific? Opera 9.64 Just Works w/o any flashing for me. I did notice a post automagically appearing below mine w/o doing a manual page refresh... or is that part of Live Thread?

I don't think Opera fully supports the YUI animations. I'm working on getting rid of it now. Note that a thread is only "live" for 5 minutes. The intention here is that for threads where a few people are continually posting, say to work on a particular issue, they don't have to keep reloading the page to check for responses or updates, they'll just automatically see new posts.

--jeremy

Oh, I see, so it's kinda like the LQ Spy only per-thread. Maybe there should be a way to toggle it ?

Is there a reason you WOULDN'T want to see new replies in a thread you're actively participating in? The opacity fade should be completely gone now. If you're still seeing it, try shift-refresh to ensure you have the latest .js files. If you see it after doing that, let me know the browser you're using.

--jeremy

Thanks jeremy, I will do so.

I have nothing against the answers showing up automatically, overall when I am responding (because at that point I can't just press f5 to refresh the page). I just didn't like the animation because of the usability issue, for the rest, the feature is really great. :)

I use Opera and have experienced the flashing, and I agree with the others, it's annoying as hell.

I'm glad to see that Jeremy intends to get rid of it. :)

I have been the next unfortunate victim of this 'live thread' thing. Honestly its distracting. I was in the middle of replying to a post, when suddenly the thread kept jumping from the last post of the thread, to the text box I was typing my reply for said thread. It pretty much prevented me from typing anything, since I couldn't get my cursor back in the box. I had to wait until the page finally settled down, and continue. Not to mention it pretty much slowed down firefox. I'm sure it wouldn't have, if I were on a more modern machine, but I still like my old AMD, and I see no reason for having to HAVE a new machine just for simple web browsing/thread posting.

LQ Spy was enough. I'm sure there is some kind of use for the live thread, but I think I would like an option to have it disabled, at least for me in my user settings, cause it just causes problems on my ancient desktop.