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Announcing the hotlist_flex box
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By hillct , Section Code []
Posted on Sat Jan 05, 2002 at 12:00:00 PM PST
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This variant of the hotlist box provides some additional functionality. It allows the user to move between three different views of the box. First, is the default hotlist view. Second, the stories hotlist view, which displays all the stories written by the user in order that they may more easily track comments made. Third, and perhaps most useful is the Replies view, which displays a dynamic list of stories having comments by the logged in user, to which there are unread replies.
The box is available for beta testing here. After I sift through any feedback I get, I'll post it to the Scoop Box Exchange. Update [2002-1-12 7:54:46 by hillct]: Version 0.2.2 has been posted to the FTP site. It incorporates Rusty's CGI parameter fix and a better method for checking logged-in status.
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This box was developed in response to a suggestion made by janra and it's been described durring it's evolution but I'm going to try and consolidate things a bit here.
The box was originally intended only to display comment replies, but it seemed to me that this was too similar to a hotlist to warrant use of the additional real estate required for a new box so I combined the comment replies functionality into the hotlist box and added the user stories view as a convenience because a good portion of my hotlist is my own stories so I can track the new comments made once the story scrolls off the front page. Some might think this feature redundant since you can see all your stories using the 'My Stories' link off the user box, but that view doesn't display the number of new comments posted since the story was last viewed.
One side effect of his combination of functionality into one box is that the box doesn't disappear when there is no data to display in the current view because the menu must still be displayed. This is somewhat inconsistent with the behavior of most other boxes but it seemed to be a reasonable trade-off.
The comment replies view displays the subject of the story to which unread replies (to user comments) are attached. It also displays the subject lines of the user comments to shich the replies were made. It's important to note here that the box does not require alterations to the DB. It utilizes data available in the 'viewed_stories' table which means it does not track views of individual comments but only stories. This means if you click n the comment links and read the replies made, they will not be marked read, nor will the story as a whole. In order to get a story marked 'read' you must clock on the story link provided. This is both a blessing and a curse. There are cases where unread replies to multiple comments made by the logged-in user to the same story, where it would be undesirable for viewing of one of the comments to cause the story view timestamp (of sorts) to be updated. In the case of only one unread comment, viewing of that comment should cause the 'viewed_stories' table to be updated which would (in the case of this box) result in the story being removed from the Replies list. Until it got fixed in version 1.96 of Comments.pm, the behavior with regard to marking stories viewed when their comments were viewed based on whether or not the scoop admin had enabled static page caching.
In any case, I'm interested in your feedback as well as end user reaction.
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Story Views
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433 Scoop users have viewed this story.
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