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Flatforty Survey

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Dear Dot-Lovers,

reports about the death of the flatforty feature on the dot are greatly exaggerated . In fact it seems to be working again, I have no idea why it was gone. Probably some maintenance lead to problems. Anyway, I have always wondered why that feature is so pupular with people, especially since it’s hard to see what thread this posting belongs to at first sight. So I have some questions:

1. Do you like/use the flatforty function? If so, why? if not, why not?
2. Would you like to be able to subscribe to Flatfourty as an RSS feed rather than reading it online?

Please feel free to submit your answers in the comments.

9 Comments on “Flatforty Survey”

  1. “1. Do you like/use the flatforty function? If so, why? if not, why not?”

    I absolutely do – I personally find that it is usually fairly obvious what thread a comment belongs to (the thread title appears above the comment in the flatforty display), and it is massively more convenient than scrolling through an article, trying to find the newest comments (I always use the threaded view when reading comments, so newly added ones can appear in multiple places), especially when there are several articles currently under heavy discussion.

    I prefer reading it online – I think it’s a little too high-traffic for RSS, personally.

    I was very pleased to see it return this morning 🙂

  2. 1. I use the flatforty function as a crude workaround for seeing new posts to an article. Often, I read an article at a time where there a very few comments. When I come back a few days later to see new comments, it is very difficult to see which comments are new, so I use the flatforty function instead.
    This workaround of course has some limitations, I guess flatforty was not designed for that:
    – maximum of 40 new comments
    – I don’t see the context of the comments (parent post or thread)
    – flatforty has comments to all articles, not just the one I’m interested in.

    2. No, I wouldn’t use the RSS feed

    Thanks for working on the dot and for fixing the flatforty function.

  3. You may want to make the flatforty link in this blog entry actually working, at the moment it doesn’t since the link is gref’ed instead href’ed. =)

    I also like flatforty as is. Maybe optionally allowing set amount of recent comments shown or setting a duration (comments last x hours, today, last x days etc.) would be an improvements, but that would invalidate flatforty’s name.

    What I really want to see is a date/timestamp for the dot articles in the rss file. The item’s called and should contain a date/time according to RFC822. After adding that Clee should have no more reason to not include the dot on planety.

  5. Btw: I added a RFC 822 timestamp and a guid to each item on the dot rss. It will take a while for http://www.kde.org to sync them, though, so hold your breath.

  7. Someone had turned off the cron job for the flatforty static updates. I just turned it back on, since there were a lot of complaints about it being broken… 🙂

  9. Ah, so it was you! Thanks! I realized I must have broken something, but I forgot the difference between the dynamic the static version. That’s also why I was unable to reproduce it. Anyway, glad to have it fixed.