Chat Format Cluttered/Hard to Follow

Avatar
Emma2013
  • updated
  • Under review

The Chat format is very frustrating & NOT user friendly at all. It's super hard to follow a thread. It requires an inordinate amount of time to sort through the comments because so many of the posts are REPEATED. Additionally, there is no way (that I can see) where one can jump from one date to another. Surely a big commercial site like SA can do better! For a clean, easy to use discussion board, check out Motley Fool's Investing Discussion board such as this one:

https://boards.fool.com/value-investing-116151.aspx

PLEASE, please upgrade to a better chat format - you owe it to subscribers!

Thanks!

Replies 4
Avatar
0
balahmay

I agree 100%.  The group that I am in discourages "reply in thread" which would keep things somewhat organized, but they don't like it because reply in thread results in a smaller font that is hard for some to see.  So they use "quote" which results in reply messages scattered all over and massive numbers of lengthy duplicated messages.   


We shouldn't even have to comment about this because online forums is one of the oldest uses for the internet.  How to do it well has been all figured out for a long time.  Unfortunately, Rocket Chat is like a first attempt at something that was never done before.  It clearly needs a major overhaul of the user interface. 

Chat should start with an abbreviated topic or question, a title so to speak.  A whole list of topics on the screen is typical.   They can be quickly scanned through and the important ones of interest selected.  Clicking on a topic opens up the full narrative of what it is about.   Then the number of responses is indicated by a digit that can be clicked on.  Clicking on the number opens up all the responses all in order.  All nice and neat and efficient.  You don't have to search all over for responses to questions or topics.  You don't have to read a whole paragraph to figure out what the topic or question is about.  You don't have to filter through endless duplication's.    

Interesting that Seeking Alpha doesn't use Rocket Chat for their own feedback forum.  Here is another example of a forum that works perfectly.  You can even see the organizational pattern of threads within threads.   It was figured out by farmers, years ago: https://www.yesterdaystractors.com/jd/wwwboard1.html

Avatar
0
SA Editor Daniel Shvartsman
  • Under review

Kilo Delta and Emma2013, thank you for the messages and the feedback. We've been pushing Rocket Chat for more control over threading and how these features work, similar to what Slack does. They are committed to rolling out improvements, and I hope to have an update soon. Unfortunately, we've had a renewed bout of basic stability issues over the last few weeks, so that has risen to the foreground as a priority, but once we clear that away we expect to see development on this front.


My question to both of you and anybody else who looks at this - both examples you refer to are message boards rather than chat rooms. They're not live-updating, real-time experiences, so they would operate a little differently then a chat you can log into from any device and that has thousands of people who can write at the same time.


You could in some sense use an article's comment stream for a message board sort of experience, with each article providing the base topic. Does that distinction make sense to you, and do you feel there's any risk in losing the real-time spontaneity if we were to move to a message board model? Why doesn't the article comment stream adequately replace this? I'm not trying to disagree with your premise, just curious to hear how you think about this.


Thank you again for sharing your input, we need to do better and your feedback will be valuable in that effort.

Best,

Daniel

Avatar
0
balahmay

OK well my bad for not knowing the difference between message boards and chat.   There are a lot of posts that get added after the articles, and reading through them is OK.   But we are a group that subscribes to a service on Seeking Alpha, and there are questions from members that come up about many different topics and articles throughout the day.  So just relying on the posts after the articles won't work.   In the chat I don't see a lot of back and forth conversation going on.  Usually someone brings up a topic and then others will chime in with one answer.  Sometimes there will be one more follow up from the original poster and that is about it.  There are two things for me that make it hard.  First is that the answers to posts get scattered all over.  They don't want us to use "reply in thread" because the resulting font size is too small.  They want "quote" used instead.  Second is that in reading through all of the messages there are massive numbers of duplication's and since there is no title or topic as a heading, you often have to read most of a paragraph to determine if it is of interest.   So I think some changes in the UI would be helpful.  Especially that problem with the font size which would allow for threading to work better. For me a message board format would be much better.  Thanks for educating me on that.  

Avatar
0
SA Editor Daniel Shvartsman

Thanks for the reply, Kilo, that's very helpful. I wasn't trying to be a stickler about definitions, to be clear, just trying to point out there's some trade-offs. I do agree that organization of topics is not good enough in our chat.