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Underground > Policy & Help >

Creation/Headshop posts that feature a large block of text

  
 
All Acting Regiment
11:30 / 01.07.05
Often a long peice of writing is posted for critique in the Creation, or for analysis in Headshop. Now, I think this is good. Sharing fiction and poetry is good, so is the helpful criticism we all provide. It's also good practice to provide the text of the theory we're discussing in headshop.

There's just one thing I've noticed, though. Often, a long peice of text means you have to scroll down for ages; this can seem to break the flow of a thread, as you have to scroll before you get the reply's reaction.

Do people find this a problem?

I've noticed that sometimes people just link to a peice: all well and good, but that puts distance between reader and peice, and links often break.

Another thing people do is just post short chunks. Fine for some occassions, but you don't understand a peice of fiction from just a few paragraphs (feel free to differ).

Could we, then, use a peice of coding where you get a little scrollable block within the post, which contains the discussed peice of writing, and have this block only a few lines long? Do you see what I mean? It's just an idea, and I was wondering what everyone else thought.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
12:40 / 01.07.05
Or summink like the Lj-cut function, where long rambling chunks of text are behind a small link saying "read more" or similar... Is that do-able here?
 
 
w1rebaby
18:56 / 03.07.05
A scrollbar is pretty easy to do.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Sed at purus eget libero gravida sodales. Pellentesque congue rutrum nulla. Suspendisse imperdiet lacus et purus. Donec rutrum facilisis sapien. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Aenean nonummy quam egestas lacus. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Praesent pulvinar sapien ut nunc. Vivamus risus. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas non erat sed est faucibus scelerisque. Sed dignissim, tortor ut vehicula iaculis, lectus mi dignissim risus, consequat pretium odio nunc sed justo. Duis quis justo eget nulla accumsan vestibulum. Duis quis dolor. Vivamus vel velit. Nulla non leo at tortor imperdiet lacinia.

Proin euismod tempus erat. Integer vitae velit sed lacus pharetra bibendum. Donec id velit. Nulla viverra sodales arcu. Morbi molestie. Phasellus consectetuer placerat dui. Integer aliquet orci ut libero. Donec pharetra arcu vel felis. Vestibulum risus felis, tristique nec, imperdiet eu, volutpat varius, tortor. Curabitur congue. Suspendisse dapibus dui a neque. Donec dictum imperdiet dui. Maecenas auctor sem eu ligula.

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Aliquam eu enim. Cras nec est. Suspendisse porta erat ut arcu. Pellentesque at lectus vitae est ornare tristique. Etiam at justo. Pellentesque placerat mollis lacus. Morbi at risus. Mauris non mauris. Sed lacus nulla, facilisis in, lacinia facilisis, convallis quis, ligula. Proin magna. Pellentesque malesuada, lectus interdum porta laoreet, erat turpis vulputate wisi, vitae volutpat dolor leo eu diam. Nunc sed libero ut ligula facilisis adipiscing. Etiam nibh arcu, laoreet non, mollis vitae, varius quis, felis. Maecenas libero. Integer lectus. Integer mauris. Pellentesque vitae tellus in orci ornare fringilla. Cras commodo mollis nisl. Aenean leo. Etiam posuere placerat nulla.
 
 
w1rebaby
18:59 / 03.07.05
I don't think it looks very good though (oops, posted instead of previewed there). It's not very readable.

As for the "read more" link... that's possible, in the same way as some of the stuff I was doing with the spoiler links. But again, I don't think it looks very good.

What we really want to do is encourage people who have a huge block of text that they want people to read to post it elsewhere and make a link to it, in the same way that we encourage people to post a link to a news article and quote selected bits of it. The current format of Barbelith is not ideal for reading huge amounts of text in. It's a fairly small font and the bar is fairly thin. Bulletin boards just aren't meant for vast posts.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
19:51 / 03.07.05
That's seems like a fair enough answer fridge, Fridge. Even so, could you post the code for that scrolling box?

Maybe one of us (me, unless anyone else wants to) can try it sometime, and if it works it works, but if enough people don't like it we can just edit it out.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
23:33 / 03.07.05
Oh dude, no way! That's the ugliest thing I've ever seen. If people want to contribute to a thread then they should have to read all of the text anyway so I don't see why it should be edited or concealed from the main page.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
23:39 / 03.07.05
The code's in the source of this page, Legba - just select "view source" on your browser. I can see the problem we'd be aiming to address - long text passages in the Barbelith format can be hard to read, and the instinct is to scroll straight down, in which case it is also a lot of text to scroll down through. I like Fridge's encouragement solution better, though, in part because the scrollbar is an extra level of complexity in interfacing with the text and also because Tom might strip the functionality out of Barbelith in future in response to some abuse - which is why the spoiler jscript struck me as a dubious idea also...
 
 
Jack Vincennes
07:06 / 04.07.05
It's also a lot harder to read text 5 lines at a time, as the box within the body of the post makes you do, than it is to read things an entire page of text at a time. Whilst it makes it harder to scroll down once the thread's in progress, I agree with Nina that having all the text on the screen at once increases the likelihood of people actually reading it.
 
  
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