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Comment by phs2501 | Hacker News Reader

Semi off-topic: What is up with the lkml.org threading interface and why is it so ridiculously inconsistent?

I've always found it really frustrating that lkml.org seems to be the canonical web link that comes up for kernel mailing list discussions because of this, as I really find the threading there frustrating; it's nearly impossible to determine whether you've read the entire (sub-)thread.

Back when Gmane was alive I usually gravitated there as an alternative.

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lkml.org owner here; let me explain the current behaviour: If available, it shows you the grandparent message and all its descendants for up to four levels (so n-2 to n+2), and if you navigate to another message it will just do that again - which means that the whole tree will change.

Suggestions (or working links to what you like better) are welcome!

How about just show the whole thread? If it is a huge thread, so be it, we want to know.

A simple enhancement would be to show (for instance with "...") if there are more levels, that is, if there's a n-3 or n+3, put a ... where it would be. That would make it at least a little bit easier to navigate, by making it explicit when you're seeing an incomplete view of the thread.

Something like google groups will be great. You can expand/see all replies though not in threaded mode (just linear).

As I just noted above, my problem was apparently with caching. I saw the message linked in TFA a couple days ago, when it had no replies yet. Multiple days later, I still saw it as having no replies, until I force-refreshed.

Personally I would like some way to navigate through the whole thread in some sort of reasonable order. My preference would be depth-first with the leaves sorted by the most recent post /in that subtree/. This matches how tools like newsreaders and Mutt will sort threads, and I believe how Gmane worked as well. (Though I will admit that for something like a web site that does not keep the state of whether posts are read or not, reordering leaves like that may be confusing. In a tool like Mutt it is useful behavior as when new posts come in they will naturally gravitate to the bottom [or top, depending on your sort order] of your message list).

In particular I'd like to be able to, starting with a particular post, repeatedly hit "next" and be assured that once I hit the next sibling post to the original I've read that entire subthread. Gmane let you do this just by whacking the space bar; if you weren't at the bottom of a post it would page down, if you were it would go to the next one.

In other words I'd like it to behave as much like a good NNTP newsreader as possible.

> like a good NNTP newsreader

That's lost technology from the golden age of our ancestors, who were so much greater than any of us now ;-)

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic, but because the format and transport were fixed, it enabled the creation of many clients, some of which had some incredible useful innovations.

Today this innovation has moved to the myriad of proprietary alternatives (like Slack or our very own HN) but they are closed worlds so not only can nobody create a new client, we also loose all the contents if the company dies (which isn't rare).

--grumpy greybeard

it's not lost - it's just not in the spotlight due to these young person's webs.. facebook, twatter or whatever .)

there is plenty of active usenet groups, comp.arch being one of the best places where the greybeards meet.

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