Whenever a comment link refers to a comment that is not on the first page of a thread, the link does not take you to the comment.

More details from http://drupal.org/node/26966 where this problem has been thoroughly discussed (and fixed in D7 but not in D6)....

When you, as admin, set the default number of comments per page, the links to those comments are not updated as they should be.

For example, all links to individual comments still go to /node/x/#comment-x but comment no. x may not be on that page if x is bigger than the number of comments per page. Hence the link is wrong.

This includes links from the 'recent comments' block and also very importantly after someone has submitted a new comment, they should be taken to their comment but if their new comment isn't on the first page then they have the same problem.

This is a *big* problem if you have discussion/comment threads of more than about 100 posts (some threads on my site are over 300 posts) and hence you can't sensibly include them all on one page.

There is a sort of semi-fix in D6 Permalinks module... but we do not yet have a solution for D6 that works everywhere comment links are used (i.e., Views)

Comments

aharown07’s picture

aharown07 commented
Category: feature » bug
hgmichna’s picture

hgmichna commented

… we do not yet have a solution for D6 that works everywhere comment links are used (i.e., Views)

I think we do: #677082: Comment links - JavaScript solution

rmjiv’s picture

rmjiv commented

Not sure if this is really the correct issue for this, but here goes.

We have a site that has threaded comments and some of our comment threads run to hundreds of comments. Consequently we have the described problem of figuring out what page a new comment is added on. One of the solutions that we're considering is to introduce the concept of a "comment thread detail page". In essence, it would be a view of a comment, the comment's thread ancestors, and (perhaps) a comment's thread siblings. It may or may not having paging; making it unpaged would be simplest. Even if it has paging, I think it is easy enough to count the total number of comments that would apply to this thread and therefore determine which page an individual comment would appear on.

We haven't worked out all of the details of this idea yet, so be gentle. :)

Thoughts?

andypost’s picture

andypost
he/him
Primary language Russian
commented

introduced JavaScript solution is not suitable for most sites, subscribe

hgmichna’s picture

hgmichna commented

Re: #3 rmjiv - I also proposed this, already a long time ago, in the original thread. I think this proposal points to a better, simpler solution than determining the page number.

However, determining the page number is possible, and it has already been done for Drupal 7, as far as I understand. But it may well haunt Drupal, because all kinds of other code, present or future, may be affected, such as views.

hgmichna’s picture

hgmichna commented

Re #4 - andypost:

Why not? Which problems did you have?

My experience is pretty good, particularly in the face of not having any other solution for Drupal up to version 6 and also no other solution for classic links in the form of …/node/[nodenumber]#comment-[commentnumber].

Also this was only designed as a stopgap measure. The whole thing was programmed in a few hours. Compare that to the effort for the Drupal 7 semi-solution, which still fails with classic links (for which I also proposed a full solution).

I'd be interested to hear about any problems with the JavaScript solution.

andypost’s picture

andypost
he/him
Primary language Russian
commented

I agree that this is a real working solution!
Except known problems described in #677082: Comment links - JavaScript solution
which IMO not suitable for common-case (mostly about #2 and #1)

hgmichna’s picture

hgmichna commented

Of course, don't use this solution if you have a better one (or if you want to tell us that dead links are your solution).

As far as I can tell, the common case is that (a) links to old articles, that actually require paging, are rarely used, and (b) only few articles have many pages. The largest number of pages on my web sites seems to be something around 3 or 4. Again no problem. It would become a problem only if you

  1. had many articles with dozens of pages, and
  2. if links to much older comments, that are usually relegated to the higher-numbered pages, are frequently used.

How often does that happen? I haven't seen it anywhere. Can anyone show me an example of a problematic link of that kind anywhere in the real world? And note that it would still work, just a bit more slowly.

Please report, if you have tried this solution. Have you seen any actual (rather than imagined) problems?

I think we should discuss this in its own, separate issue:
#677082: Comment links - JavaScript solution

aharown07’s picture

aharown07 commented

The javascript solution I tested (if this is the same one discussed near the end of here: http://drupal.org/node/26966 )
isn't suitable for our situation because of the length of time involved... and users not really knowing what's going on while the page repeatedly reloads.
What I asked in that thread, I'll repeat here: is there a way to make the javascript approach quicker and more streamlined if you have threading turned off and set all your content types to the same number of comments per page?
What I'm fishing for is a way for it to calculate the page and go to it rather than scan the page, go the next, etc.

hgmichna’s picture

hgmichna commented

Sure, technically that is doable. The main problem is that the number of people for whom this would be useful is much lower than those who need a universal solution.

By the way, I have already made a similar two-page proposal to work with classic comment links in issue #679772: Old-school comment URL #fragments still don't display correct page for Drupal 7, which currently still has the problem that it cannot process classic links.

aharown07’s picture

aharown07 commented

Not sure the proper way to ask this but... what might something like I described in #10 cost if I were to try to hire it out? Are we talking about dozens of hours?

hgmichna’s picture

hgmichna commented

You mean a modification to the existing JavaScript program that would allow to calculate the target page from the comment numbers on the first page, then jump there directly?

The actual work is not all that much, perhaps a couple of hours, anyway less than a day. Probably just as much work time would be needed to find out how exactly Drupal behaves when threading is switched off. I wouldn't like to write a program that fails too easily, when the Drupal site in question shows some peculiarities.

If you wanted to encourage or even force users to disable threading, you would have to set the default to non-threaded, which is easy, or you would have to remove the threading option, which requires either an add-on module or a patch or perhaps a specialized or patched theme.

A patch to the Drupal code would have the decisive disadvantage that it would have to be adapted and applied to each new version of Drupal, so a module would be better. The effort of creating a module would be high for me, because I've never done it and don't have the infrastructure in place. Perhaps somebody else would jump in and do that part, while I do the JavaScript part.

aharown07’s picture

aharown07 commented

Well, personally I wouldn't need a module, though I can see why that would be desirable in general. There are only a couple of admins who have access to turn threading on and they know better than to do that so... for us it's a nonissue.

hgmichna’s picture

hgmichna commented

As far as I know, every user can turn comment threading on and off and change some other related settings.

aharown07’s picture

aharown07 commented

That's all handled in the content type set up, which users cannot access unless they are given necessary permissions... unless you expose the threading options to users. That's also and option in the content type.
We don't allow users to turn that on because we use Comment Mover, which is much more straightforward without threading (we've also found that our forum users are not interested in using threading).... and use Flatforum also. So all replies are to the node.

mau-it’s picture

mau-it commented

subscribing

jhodgdon’s picture

jhodgdon
she/her
Primary language English
commented

Just noting that the comment links from the comment admin overview and comment moderation pages are also incorrect, if the comment happens to fall on a later page of comments and not on the first page. And this is still a problem as of Drupal 6.19.

aharown07’s picture

aharown07 commented

There's a fix for this now using Permalinks and a couple of patches. The patches have not been committed, but I have been using them succesfully for months. See #886886: Views integration for comment permalinks

jhodgdon’s picture

jhodgdon
she/her
Primary language English
commented

Does that fix the comment admin pages as well?

aharown07’s picture

aharown07 commented

I don't use the admin pages, but just did a little test and it appears that the fix does not work there. I don't know why it wouldn't. In any case, you can use Views to produce the same thing the admin pages display (only much better... more info) and the links there work. The reason we don't use the comment admin page is that Views provides a much better comment management interface (especially with Views Bulk Operations also installed)

jhodgdon’s picture

jhodgdon
she/her
Primary language English
commented

This issue is in the Drupal Core issue queue. Which is to say, it's about comment links in Drupal core, and needs to be fixed in core.

aharown07’s picture

aharown07 commented

Yeah, that would be nice.

Status: Active » Closed (outdated)

Automatically closed because Drupal 6 is no longer supported. If the issue verifiably applies to later versions, please reopen with details and update the version.