Sorting of comments in the answers

[Jelena]

Just opened an answer and the dialog in the comments seems very odd unless you check the time stamp. The older comment (OP's question) is shown below the comment that answers it.

I don't recall seeing such behavior and am wondering if this is a result of yet another "improvement". My best guess could be the comments might be sorted by "likes" but I don't have any evidence to support this theory.

If indeed someone thought this was a swell idea I'd like to point out that this makes the comments rather difficult to follow. It also leaves an impression that either one of the commentators has psychic abilities or teammates have been secretly spiking my coffee with LSD. Not exactly a successfull outcome of an average visit to SAP Community, I'm afraid.

[former_member186338]

It's better to restore comments hierarchy 🙂 And even much better to remove answers/comments and have simply replies with hierarchy (and with the option to sort by time).

[agentry_src]

I think this is deja vu all over again. Folks have been asking for this for almost three years now. It got more traction in the community once people understood how difficult it was, apparently, to properly separate Comments from Answers.

Of course Answers being so prominently visible relative to Comments has resulted in a higher percentage of Questions being answered even if many of the Answers should have been Comments instead. Simple Responses could be configured for both WordPress and AnswerHub with a little bit of tweaking to AnswerHub. Converting existing Comments to Answers (relabeled as Responses) might be a little bit more complicated. Maybe just leave them as historically created and remove the option for the second type of response? KISS rules...

[former_member186338]

agentry_src

Both answers and comments have to be converted to responses, preserving hierarchy!

Not sure that it can be done on the AnswerHub platform:

1. Answers can be selected as "Accepted", but have no hierarchy.

2. Comments have hierarchy, but can't be selected as "Accepted"

[Jelena]

You certainly get my vote for removing answers/comments and just sticking with replies or whatever we call it. It's been challenging before and the recent changes just keep making it worse, I'm afraid.

[iklovski]

Fully agree... When answers/comment was introduced in 2016, the problems were already spotted and reported accordingly. Ample solutions were proposed... However, current situation represents aggravation of the platform, as the approach applied was only 'half-solution': comments functionalities were partially removed, converting ability - cancelled, etc. I'm afraid 'agiledemy' is to blame. Agile approach for IT systems development can be useful, but it is not a panacea. Mercedes with two wheels is still a drawback compared to Renault with four.

[VolkerBarth]

this makes the comments rather difficult to follow

IMHO, the initially collapsed comments already make it difficult to follow them... - and this question is a good example: I really hate it to have to expand them for each answer just to see 2 or 3 comments. - If it were, say, 5 or more, then I would accept that but with a low number of comments it's rather unneccesary work.

(Of course that has also been discussed often enough.)

[VolkerBarth]

Funny: After I submitted my answer, I lost track and had the impression it was not stored – because it was displayed above Mike's answer starting with "I never used", for whatever reasons. Both have 0 votes currently, so that should not matter here (unless there's an issue with the "1-1 <> 0 votes math" here).

[Jelena]

Just came here to mention the comments that are now collapsed by default and only the last one is shown. This might make sense if all the comments are not connected at all but usually there is a dialog involved. The last comment out of the context looks very weird. For example, here my comment where I'm asking a follow-up question is hidden, so we can see only a reply which leaves one wonder what is this even regarding.

Only if you click "Show all" then the context becomes clear.

The new comment design makes them practically useless pretty much in any scenario. Whether I'm looking at my own question, answering another or just searching for information I find this setup very unproductive in every case.

Might as well just do away with the comments altogether. This kind of pushing them out by rendering unusable makes no sense IMHO.

[VolkerBarth]

the comments that are now collapsed by default

IIRC, that is not a new behaviour bus has been that way for a long time, a guess since summer 2017.

And it's even more difficult to find out that there's one "Show all" button here that "doesn't work" because it's part of your sceenshot. "Rendering unusable..."

[Steffi_Warnecke]

@Volker: Nope, it's new, that the last comment is shown. Before that, no comment was shown.

What's more difficult for me at the moment is, that I don't get pictures displayed in the post anymore. Jelena's post looks like this to me:

😞

[VolkerBarth]

Nope, it's new, that the last comment is shown. Before that, no comment was shown.

Ah, I missed that detail, thanks for pointing that out, steffi.warnecke. – FWIW, this thread shows the need for a thread hierarchy, I'm so glad that nested comments still work in the CC, at least...

[former_member186338]

steffi.warnecke

Don't use IE11 🙂

Jpg images in SAP Community are not visible in IE11. Png - fine!

Looks like developers are not performing tests on IE.

[agentry_src]

I never used the hierarchy with Jive. I know you and Juergen did, probably others as well. I just figured out the context of the answers from what was still showing as unread (another feature which has been completely ignored since Open Beta). I agree that it would make the structure easier to follow, but I managed fine without it.

With Track in Communications (yes, harping on it yet again), I was able to be current with many topics easily even without using the hierarchy. Sigh...

[former_member186338]

Sample case, where hierarchy tree is required to understand the logic:

QA - Question Author

RA1 - Reply author 1

RA2 - Reply author 2

.

QA: Question: How to ...

..RA1: Solution 1

....QA: But what to do in case of ...

......RA1: You have to ...

...

..RA2: Solution 2

....RA1: This proposal will not work due to...

......RA2: But I think ...

........RA1: No, in this case...

...

[agentry_src]

Hi Vadim,

I know what you mean. I just never used it. Since I was monitoring a few times a day, there were never so many posts that I could not follow the sequence of the unread posts. And since I was almost always current with any questions which had an extended dialog, I never needed to use a hierarchical presentation. Not saying it did not have value for others.

Cheers, Mike

[agentry_src]

Well, there are three types of responses available for AH (one is not used at all in SAP Community). The best scenario (from discussions with AH two years ago) would be to turn off Comments and relabel Answers as Responses or Replies. That allows a specific Response to be assigned Correct Solution (Answer). All Answers would also be sequenced by timestamp rather than in any type of hierarchy. This is similar to how Jive worked (by default) in SCN. This could have been done years ago when it was brought to the attention of the Community Experience and IT teams. But as with most other community input, it was ignored.

I am pretty sure all the Comments could be converted to Answers since the functionality is already available to Moderators. So no real technical roadblocks exist. Just needs a decision to make the change.

[agentry_src]

Not sure that a hierarchy would be possible with the scenario that I outlined above. It has been a couple years since I asked DZone about that potential (DZone is the source of AnswerHub).

[former_member186338]

agentry_src

"Not sure that a hierarchy would be possible with the scenario that I outlined above" - this is the key thing! Hierarchy was available with Jive. It was 100% clear that some reply was linked to some previous reply. If you have multiple branches in the discussion - time stamp will not help you, you need a real hierarchy! To my mind, AnswerHub platform is not a right choice for SAP Community. I have written about it 2 years ago, and have the same opinion today.

SAP Questions are answered with the help of discussion.

Discussion = discussion tree.

Discussion tree requires hierarchy.