[Feedback] [UI] Poor accessibility of posts with many comments

[MasterInQuestion]

    Current web UI cannot adequately scale to handle large posts (e.g. 1,000,000 comments).
    The single-page (one-page) design provides poor accessibility: failing at hundreds.

    Live examples:
    https://github.com/MasterInQuestion/TEST/issues/4#issuecomment-1314215587
    https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/23204
    https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/17373#issuecomment-932700252

    See also:
    https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/139005#discussioncomment-10826647
    https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/139935#discussioncomment-11372528

    [ Quote jcready @ CE 2024-10-25 00:04:09 UTC:
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/139935#discussioncomment-11046492
    I unsubscribed from this issue.
    I got a notification that I was mentioned: I open it and I can't find where I was most recently mentioned.
    I tried sorting by "New", but this just sorts by the parent thread: completely ignoring the replies.
    I see a "Load more" thing in the middle of all the comments. I click it:
    It loads like 10 more comment of the 90+ hidden comments.
    And now the "Load more" thing is gone. ]

[benjiallen]

@MasterInQuestion thanks for the feedback, can you help understand if this is a general access issue or an issue that disproportionately affects people with disabilities?

[ghostinhershell]

Hey @MasterInQuestion,

I wanted to ping you here again just in case you missed @benjiallen's question above. Any additional clarification and feedback would help us point you in the right direction. Thanks!

[SantjagoCorkez]

My 2 cents into this.

If a page has large amount of comments, the page only shows some amount of the newest ones, prepending the list of comments with a "Load earlier comments..." button.

That button itself only loads a limited amount of comments, so if the actual number of comments is really large, only a portion of older comments gets loaded and the user needs to press the button again. And again. And again... And at some point the user gets banned because of HTTP/429 Rate Limit.

I've tested that without being authenticated. And after I've authenticated I've tried once more and seems authenticated users are not rate-limited.

But still are required to spam the "Load earlier comments..." button over and over again.

So, if restriction on loading the whole load of the comments is more or less understandable if requested by an anonymous user (to prevent denials of service and/or heavy loads on the backend infrastructure), the same behavior while the user is authenticated cannot be understood. If an authenticated user doesn't get rate-limited whatever happens, why such a user cannot just optionally choose to load the whole bulk at once?

I've just got my browser accidentally crash and when I re-opened the browser the page reverted to its initial state so I needed to spam the button again just to get the whole conversation thread.

[adamency]

@MasterInQuestion Pagination is the worst solution to suggest to Github, especially since they never allow you to choose the number of elements per page. Have you never tried to search for a specific commit, release, package, or tag of a project in github ? You literally take dozens of minutes clicking hundreds of times on that same button, until finding the page which holds the one you were looking for. While with a git repository, it is found in 5 seconds.

No, the proper solution is to be able to search the full content. And having all comments on the same page is actually one of the few good things that Github has done, since we can thus have a global view of the evolution of the issue from the start to now.

[SantjagoCorkez]

I'd vote for an option to load the whole set of comments at once being available to at least authenticated users. Another separate button near "Load earlier comments..." or a checkbox (unchecked by default) which switches that "Load earlier comments..." button's behavior. That'd at least improve the usability since would provide one with an option to download everything with a single click on once's choice. Would be of more balance between default lazy load which of course is designed in favor of lowering the backend load and an option to still override in some (I presume) rare cases when that's needed.

[jglick]

Many of GitHub’s own discussion pages quickly become unreadable. I left a comment somewhere in https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/143787 and now

You’re receiving notifications because you commented.

which is OK but if the original poster actually replied to me in the middle of dozens of other threads I would be hard-pressed to find that out. Searching for my user name via browser Ctrl-F does not work because my thread is long since hidden. I can PageDown for a while until I see

67 hidden items
Load more…

but clicking that still does not show mine, and instead I need to search again for

37 hidden items
Load more…

then

7 hidden items
Load more…

and finally I can search for my user name and find my comment, only to see that there has been no response yet. This is terribly inconvenient. Issues would have been a better format.