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Less chatty Maniphest feed rendering
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Description

When I read through a Maniphest task to attempt to understand it better (the original plan, the blind alleys / rejected ideas, the discussion along the way, eventually the current status), as someone who is not necessarily involved in it, I am currently swamped in auxiliary information. The amount of information I'd consider extraneous makes it very difficult to see the useful bits, either because you skim too hard, spend too much time on it because you're not skimming, or simply lose the will to live.

For instance, between T5474#82198 and T5474#106976, two adjacent comments on a rather popular task:

  • 19 people subscribed themselves
  • 8 people awarded tokens at the same time as subscribing themselves, so requiring double the visual real estate to add an AOL
  • it was mentioned in 6 other tasks (this is actually potentially useful, but gets lost in the noise if you're trying to skim)

On a 3200x1800 display, with Chrome in full screen, this is 1.8 screens' worth of pixels.

Obviously there is use for this information (someone subscribes then later unsubscribes: did they see a particular comment? the transaction log will tell you), but collapsing this in some way by default would be nice. Thanks.

Event Timeline

See Contributing Feature Requests for what information we look for in feature requests. This feels more like design feedback (which we don't take as tasks).

My overall concern here is it's a coinflip as to whether that information is useful or not. Mentions nearly always are and while probably not subscriptions, designing a complicated, magical display around thin edge cases doesn't seem like a good use of upstream time. It's unclear that other installs see the same problem (we tend to have tasks that are of high interest for years).

@chad OK, fair enough; I guess just close this and I'll build something locally.

@fooishbar - would something like a "collapsed" or "comments-only" view be what you're thinking of? In the example comments you listed there was a 6-month time-span between the two comments. Having ~30 events listed seems natural for a popular task. If it was a few days to a week that would be more frustrating/difficult to read, but I also imagine far less common.

@cspeckmim Right, that was an edge case indeed, but even very active tasks can rapidly pick up a huge number of subscribers/tokens/etc (something I'm seeing on my install). I'd personally aim for a collapsed-but-expandable '[+] 16 users subscribed, 7 tokens awarded', but this is definitely getting deep into design territory.

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I don't think this clearly describes a root problem. PHI33 touches on similar issues, and I'll file something vaguely in this realm if anything comes of that.

I don't think this clearly describes a root problem. PHI33 touches on similar issues, and I'll file something vaguely in this realm if anything comes of that.

Unfortunately PHI33 is not visible to mere mortals.