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Hi, I find the KernelTrap's mailing list interface much cleaner than either GMANE or lkml.org; thanks for this!
What I wanted to say is, the index pages could certainly fit more messages than the current 25. Having more titles visible at once means that they can be skimmed much quicker.
increased
I've increased the default value from 25 to 50, as I agree with you that 25 isn't enough. I'm tempted to say 50 is too much, though, and may drop it to 40. In any case, there's also a hidden feature in that you can manually adjust this value by adding "&messages_per_page=#" to the URL. (It will only accept values from 1-100). It's not especially useful, however, as the value won't be remembered from page to page - I'll consider making it an optional per-user setting.
Thanks for the compliments on the interface! I'm open to all ideas on how it can be further improved and made more useful. Next I plan to add RSS feeds, allowing you to subscribe to any mailing list by RSS, or even to just an author within a mailing list.
Great, except for one thing
I agree the interface is great, but one thing I find very annoying is that it collapses quoted text by default. It's quite irritating having to reveal it each time in order to see the exact point someone is replying to, maybe this could be a per-user setting. There is also a bug that screws up the formatting of the expanded quoted text.
To make matters worse, this mis-feature spills over into the front page articles, where messages are pasted without the quoted text they are replying to, and with no way to expand it.
For an example, look at this current item:
http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Continued_Atheros_Discussions
In the very first message, Theodore Tso is replying to someone, but you have no idea what exactly he's replying to, you have to dig through the archive and find the original message to understand the context.
the front page example works for me
the quoted text is readable in iceweasel (debian etch...), though it is imaginable that browsers can misunderstand the
>.of course there is the other bug: preformatted text that does not fit into the content column is hidden behind the right column. i have to scale the text to read the rightmost words of the quoted mails.
long lines
This is a long standing bug with the current theme. Aside from a complete redesign, which is unlikely to happen any time soon (I'm not a theme designer, and I'm not in a position currently to pay someone else to do it), perhaps I could simply have the right column float under the center column? Thus, long lines would just render right over the top of the right column -- would that solve the issue at hand?
yes
yes, that sounds like a sane work around
quoted text
Interesting, I personally rather like that it's collapsed by default, as it's text from the previous email which I just read... certainly, I can make this user-configurable. Anonymous users will be stuck with the default, if I get a lot of complaints I can make it expanded by default.
I'm still trying to get to the bottom of this one. All emails are now auto-inserted from the mail archives... I used to do this manually, at which time I'd edit it down a little, such as removing over-exuberant quotes from previous messages (if they already exist earlier in the quoted thread). I liked the idea of simply auto-collapsing quoted material, as the curious would still be able to read the quoted text if they wanted...
That was the idea, anyway. There seems to be a bug with caching that is preventing the necessary javascript from loading. This should result in the text being auto-expanded, but for some reason the opposite is happening. Until I figure out why, I suppose I'll have to disable auto-collapsing in the main stories.
FWIW: Rather than digging, you can just click on the subject of the email in question. That will take you directly to the message in the mail archives. The collapse-bug doesn't appear to affect the mail archives, only the front page content, so on the mail archive version you should always be able to view the quoted text. Worst case, you could click the "thread previous" button to see the mail that was being replied to.
Thanks for the feedback!
auto-collapsing in stories disabled
I have disabled auto-collapsing of quoted text in the front-page articles for now, and flushed all our caches so the change immediately takes effect. I will likely restore the functionality at a future date, once I track down the bug that was causing it to not work sometimes.
I still need to create a user-option for auto-collapsing, as it's still enabled in the mail archives.
user option added
You can now go to "My account >> Edit" and scroll down to find the "Disable auto-collapse of quoted text" checkbox. Check it and save your changes, and messages will no longer be collapsed when you browse the mail archives.
Please give it a try and let me know if this solves your concerns.
Wow! That was quick, thanks
Wow! That was quick, thanks a lot.
The new option is great, in fact it looks even nicer now with "expand by default" than before the whole "quoted text" thing was implemented, because now the quoted text is always wrapped in a nice box.
You also fixed the wrapping bug, kudos.
re: quoted text
I can certainly agree with this reasoning, and it probably works well for some lists.
But my problem was that on LKML people often write long messages that touch on multiple points, and the replies often focus on just one particular point, so I have to expand the quoted text more often than not to see which particular point they're replying to.
Same with patches sent for review, people often reply to only some small part of the patch, and you really have no choice, you have to expand it to see which piece of code they are commenting on.
Or maybe I just have the attention span of a gnat and can't follow the discussion from one message to the ... oooh shiny!