Bug Report: Replies

If you don’t want to read all of this, just jump to the BUG headers. That is where I detail anomalous behavior.

This is a new type of blog I will posting from time to time. Since this is the first of what I hope will be many useful additions the Minds community, I will present a bit of my background.

I came to Minds with the hope of publishing and promoting my side gig of writing fiction. But in my day job, I work with software, and at this point I have several years of experience. The specifics I wish to keep to myself, as I try to keep my online RhetHypo persona completely separate from my professional profile. I want to make doxing me as hard as possible to protect my livelihood from crazies online, given the current political climate.

Now, I’ve had a couple people toss around the idea of me working on side projects involving some coding, but I’m just not interested in that stuff. I spend eight hours a day doing that kind of thing, and creative writing is a nice outlet that allows me a little escape while also producing something of value. But after facing multiple frustrations with Minds just having bugs in general, and having some people suggest I put up or shut up, I have decided I will do what I can with the expertise I have currently. Sure, helping code would be extremely helpful… but there is a lot of extra work associated with learning a new codebase, especially if it uses technologies I’m not familiar with. So, I settled on creating as thorough a bug report as I can for both Admins and Users.

If you are an Admin, this blog is meant to illustrate exactly how your system functions currently. This is not an attempt to call you out, this is information meant to help you determine which bugs to tackle first. I would recommend commenting on this blog if you fix a listed bug, and I will try to update it, but that is a “nice to have” and not a “need to have”. This blog is presented as is with no guarantees on the information being up to date.

If you are a User, this blog is meant to help you use the system better. Understanding the limitations of the system will help steer you away from making a post to the Help and Support group with a fundamental misunderstanding of the features, and being corrected when they say “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”. For actual bugs, I will try to provide workarounds that allow you to better use the system until they fix the bug, if they do. Please don’t annoy the Admins about any bugs presented in this blog, as I can personally vouch for the fact that developers frequently have multiple bugs on their todo list, and they have their own prioritization methods. Just because something really annoys you doesn’t mean that it is as serious as the other bugs they are looking at. And, to reiterate from above, this information might become out of date at any time, and I can’t guarantee it will always be updated.

With all that out of the way… let’s talk about replies.

A bit of history, for those who are new here… replies used to be handled differently. There was a button under each comment that, when clicked, autofilled that comment’s user in your message box. It was quite utilitarian, and frankly, I kind of wish they would include it again. Mainly, because displayed names are not actual names all the time, and you can’t tag me by writing @RhetHypo. You have to now type @RhetoricalHypothetical(though it does appear to be caseless, so @rhetoricalhypothetical will also work). And I’m not the only account with a different display name like this.

When they first rolled out the new system, I was admittedly frustrated, as the new system only slowly took effect, while immediately kneecapping our ability to respond to comments.

This was a bit of an overreaction, but to be fair, I’m rather paranoid. That makes it okay.

I calmed down… but over time, I got frustrated again. The new reply system, though it looks fine from a distance, is incredibly detrimental to conversation. I’ve noticed this, as conversations that used to continue off and on for days now die rather quickly. I believe this is, at least in part, because of two bugs specifically that I will go into right now.

First, I wanted to thoroughly test this. I made many test comments and replies with my good friend, SuperSupine(which is definitely not an alt account I use for testing things), and edited each comment to indicate whether a notification was sent or not. I hope everyone appreciates this, because I deleted a whole bunch of these test comments, so my notification feed is even more hosed than this thread would have you believe.

(*) means there was a notification. (-) means there was not.

The notification indicators, obviously, refer to the other user. I don’t want to over explain what is going on here, so I’ll just leave it at that and answer any questions in the comments.

So, a couple things I confirmed right off the bat. Let’s start with some positives.

Editing comments, something that used to a be a buggy nightmare, worked pretty good. Kudos for that, it made this entire experiment much easier. Second, if you comment on a post that you are not following and someone else comments on that post, you don’t get a notification. There used to be a problem with being unable to stop following a post and continuing to get notifications from a flame war, but it seems that has been resolved. Also, I tested if notifications work differently when you are already on the page when the comment is made. As far as I could tell, they work the same, which I find personally preferable.

But we already can see quite a few unexpected errors. First, I was previously accustomed to auto following a post once I leave a comment. This is less a bug and more of a change in system behavior. Something to keep in mind; if you want to follow the conversation and get notifications, make sure to follow the post instead of just commenting on it. Creating a new post has the creator auto-follow it, so that still works as expected.

Second, and most notably… a reply to a reply does not generate a notification.

BUG 1: REPLY TO REPLY DOES NOT SEND NOTIFICATION

If you reply to a comment, it sends a notification. If you comment on a post being followed by someone, that sends a notification. But if you reply to another reply, it does not send a notification, even if you are following the post already.

WORKAROUND

To keep a conversation going without polluting the main thread, only make replies to comments. As you can see in the first screenshot, this is perfectly acceptable, keeps conversations contained, and still sends notifications. However, this has quite a large caveat I noticed later, that I will go over next…

END BUG 1

Now, onto my next test. I tried most of the same things after following the post. Results were mostly as expected.

Generally, replying to yourself does indeed seem to be just like talking to yourself. No one else really hears it.

If you reply to yourself, in any context, even if someone else has replied under the comment you are replying to, they will not receive a notification.

BUG 2: SELF REPLIES DO NOT SEND NOTIFICATIONS

If you reply to yourself, it does not send a notification to anyone else who has replied to you under that same comment. This renders the previously mentioned workaround rather useless. You will still see notifications for replies to your comment, but not the other way around if you respond under the same comment.

WORKAROUND

Upvotes, though not tested as thoroughly given they are not the focus of this review, seem to avoid the pitfalls of these nuances. This can get someone’s attention, and bring them back to the thread after you have responded. If you don’t want to give them an upvote because you disagree with their comment, a downvote will also work. And if a person reacts hysterically to a mere downvote, stop talking to them; they probably aren’t worth your time.

It’s still possible they will not click on the upvote notification, so another option is to tag them in your comment. That has it’s own caveat, being that there is no easy way to quickly enter their actual username anymore, but it’s still an option.

END BUG 2

Those are the two main issues with the reply functionality, at least for the majority of users. But after having to deal with a wave of spam on my own channel, I discovered a few other issues that otherwise would have been completely missed by my testing.

Trash cans are the delete button, for those unaware. Take a look at where they are missing from SuperSupine's view.

This behavior is the most intriguing, as it gives me some insight into how this system might be working behind the scenes.

It seems that replies “belong” to the commenter they are responding to. Normally, you can delete a comment if you made it or if it is on your thread. BUT… if it is a reply to someone else’s comment, you can’t delete it from your thread.

BUG 3: UNABLE TO DELETE REPLIES TO OTHER COMMENTS

If a reply is made to a comment on a post, only the owner of the comment being replied to can delete it. This holds true when going into deeper levels of nested replies.

WORKAROUND

You could contact the user who is being replied to, though I think it’s probably a rare case that one would care enough to justify such activity. Another option is to delete the parent comment, but that brings up a different bug.

END BUG 3

If you take a look at the screenshot, there are six comments listed but only five comments visible. This occurs when you delete a comment with replies without deleting the replies first. There is no way to delete that reply now, and the comment count will always indicate there is a comment not visible.

BUG 4: DELETING COMMENTS WITH REPLIES STILL DOESN’T DELETE REPLIES

Deleting a comment with replies will only delete the selected comment. Replies will no longer be visible, but will still affect the comment count.

WORKAROUND

Either delete the replies first, or just accept that the comment count will be incorrect permanently for that post. This one isn’t really an issue at all unless you are a bit ocd, like me. I include it so people can potentially avoid the annoyance if they wish by deleting comments with the deepest nested replies first. Of course, that has its own issues due to Bug 3, so further cooperation with other users might be necessary.

END BUG 4

That’s all the bugs I am aware of at this time with the reply system. If there are others I missed, please let me know, and I can update this blog to include them. Thanks for reading, and I hope this gave you a better understanding of the known issues with replies.