Feedback Request: New Timeline Question View [closed]

Question

There is an experimental timeline view for questions now available on meta ONLY! (Now working on SO, SF, and SU as well)

This is partially motivated by comments about how difficult it is to follow very active questions which have a lot of activity, and also the feedback on the API which was heavily dominated by "we need to know what happened in this time range" type responses.

It can only be accessed through URL hackery at the moment. To get to it, enter question URLs like so:

https://meta.stackexchange.com/posts/{id}/timeline

This is a chronological timeline of everything that happened on a question, including

• initial question ask
• answers
• revisions
• comments
• closure, deletion, reopen, undelete, etc
• votes

all based on when they happened in chronological order.

We are thinking about making this a fourth tab on the question, like so:

Timeline | Oldest | Newest | Votes

Please try it out and provide feedback. It is still a little rough, so we are not looking for highly detailed bug reports, just more general feedback.

Timeline view for this question:
https://meta.stackexchange.com/posts/36303/timeline

Answer 1

It doesn't seem to show answers being posted but then deleted, even though I can see the deleted answer.

Generally speaking though, it looks very handy. The triangles are a bit ugly, but it's functionally great :)

EDIT: Okay, I've just tried creating and deleting a second answer for this question here on meta - again, I can't see it. I know you don't want hugely detailed bug reports, but consider this a vote to be able to see that information (users with enough rep).

In terms of other feedback...

• I'm not sure I'd make it another tab, because it's not just a different sort order for the answers. I'd consider making it another link next to "edit / close / flag" at the bottom of the question.

• The nature of the URL suggests that it should be feasible to show the timeline of just an individual answer as well. In some cases this could be very useful, rather than having to mentally filter out all the bits that for other answers. If this became available, again it could be another link in the "link / edit / flag" set.

Answer 2

Maybe it's just me, we'll see how the votes go.

Sometimes at work, we've built something that we think we want, but when we have it in front of us we realize it's designed all wrong, and we need to just throw it away and go back to the drawing board. Nothing personal, but I think this is one of those times.

To me, the way you present the data is flawed, and it results in a giant list that is essentially un-glanceable. The only way to retrieve information from it is by carefully studying times and text. Everything just blends into each other, and all I see when I look at it is a wall of text. It's functional yes - it provides the information, but I want it to do more - I want it to be 'pretty'. Recall you did hire a designer after you did the first revision of SO.

So, if you agree with me on that point, but disagree with me on the next, hopefully you'll still upvote as a sign of agreement but comment with your own idea.

What I would try and do is make a horizontal (not vertical) graph that looks something like github's but different in key points.

• First off, the indicators of activity (asked, comment, edit, etc) should be spaced relative to each other, possibly with a breaker for long periods of inactivity.
• Each activity has a flag/symbol, that upon mouseover loads the details in a div below
• You can click multiple symbols to get all those details at once

• You can select and drag to get a stretch of details (like the rep graph)

  |--X-X--o---E---X-X-X-o-o-o-o-----/ /----X-----/ /-----|

There are design flaws with this. Making it work for a popular question would be tough - you may even have to switch it to vertical.

But the biggest advantage of this is you can quickly see, at a glance, the amount of time that passes between actions in a relative sense. Those are my thoughts.

Answer 3

Can haz click to show all little arrows to expanded?

Hey, that "Return to Question" link is back! Clicking on the green "answer" in the timeline didn't go anywhere. Was expecting the answer permalink.

Like the whole page of non-pagination.

But what about those of us who would like to read down the page for the timeline instead of crawling up?

Answer 4

I didn't get the arrows the first time I looked at it. Maybe [+]/[-] would be more intuitive?

Answer 5

Should comments be placed in-context with the post?

I'm wondering.

Would comments make more sense if they were grouped under the post they apply to? Comments are pretty specific to that post. What you want to know is when comments were added to a post and which comments were added after a revision.

Group them that way.

It might make it easier to understand the sequence of events if comments were contained by the post (and revisions) instead of being interwoven with the rest of the answers.

Something like this: (This is real data, except the time stamps increment by 1 minute)

45 mins ago      question      Jeff Atwood♦     New Timeline in Question View
40 mins ago      answer        Jon Skeet
  39 mins ago      comment     Jeff Atwood♦     answer by Jon Skeet
  36 mins ago      comment     Jon Skeet        answer by Jon Skeet

38 mins ago      revised       Jeff Atwood♦     answer by Jon Skeet remove SO links
37 mins ago      revised       Jeff Atwood♦     question added 9 characters in body
  25 mins ago      comment     splattne♦        question by Jeff Atwood♦
  24 mins ago      comment     jasondavis       question by Jeff Atwood♦
  12 mins ago      comment     Brad Gilbert     question by Jeff Atwood♦
  10 mins ago      comment     jjnguy           question by Jeff Atwood♦

35 mins ago      revised       Jon Skeet        answer added 261 character in body
  34 mins ago      comment     Jeff Atwood♦     answer by Jon Skeet
  33 mins ago      comment     Jon Skeet        answer by Jon Skeet
  31 mins ago      comment     Jeff Atwood♦     answer by Jon Skeet
  27 mins ago      comment     Jon Skeet        answer by Jon Skeet
  11 mins ago      comment     Æther            answer by Jon Skeet

32 mins ago      answer        random
30 mins ago      revised       random
29 mins ago      answer        George Stocker
  28 mins ago      comment     Jeff Atwood♦     answer by George Stocker

26 mins ago      answer        Jon B.
  23 mins ago      comment     Juan Manuel      answer by Jon B.
  13 mins ago      comment     balpha           answer by Jon B.
   9 mins ago      comment     gnostradamus     answer by Jon B.
:
:

Answer 6

UPDATE: this has since been implemented

I love it, but think it should also show bounty events (ala my other feature request). But since that's a status-planned maybe it'll be included in this new UI?

Answer 7

I like it and I am going to look at the content and usability shortly but my very first impressions:

• Add a link to reverse order (in a header above the dates) - When coming into a new discussion with lots of information, it is too hard to read from the bottom up.
• Add a link to expand all arrows - Again, if you are coming in late in the conversation, that's a lot of clicking to open everything and catch up.

Answer 8

It would be good to be able to see where votes were cast in the context of the timeline, rather than having them at the top - there wouldnt be any need to show individual votes, you could just show the number of up / down votes between each other action on the timeline, for example:

• question
• 1 downvote
• edit
• 3 upvotes
• etc...

Answer 9

I really do want to see when delete events happen. Everything else looks great!

Answer 10

It would be nice if revised posts showed the actual changes. Right now, all you see is the final result; no revision markup. You can reuse the display style from SO's revision history views. Like so:

---

BEFORE (no markup)

---

AFTER (with markup)

---

Answer 11

Is acceptance of an answer supposed to appear in the timeline?

If not, could that be added?

When trying to accurately answer an acceptance rate question, I headed to the potentially referred question, and I needed to determine to a certain degree of accuracy when the accepted answer had been accepted, which the timeline isn't showing.

Answer 12

1. This question got a Nice Question badge, and I'm not seeing it in the timeline.
   It would be nice to add that information too
2. The upvotes don't contain time information (they're summarized at the top); would it be better if they were in the timeline like the rest of the actions?
3. The revised event shows the whole text; could it highlight the added text like the revision history does?

Answer 13

One can sketch up... not sure how it would work in practice, however. I can foresee a need to collapse inactivity moments...

Answer 14

I could be mis-interpreting the UI, but it feels like clicking on an 'answer' for a certain timeframe should take you to that particular edit of that answer. Instead it just takes you to what his answer most recently is, and you still have to do some mental math to determine what the answer looked like at the time before the question was edited.

Answer 15

Vote counts would be great:

• Answer by bla received 5 upvotes and 3 downvotes
• Comment by foo on answer by bla
• Answer by bla edited
• Answer by bla received 8 upvotes

That would sometimes allow to understand the impact and reason of edits better.

Answer 16

I find that the comment entries aren't very useful due to lack of context. I don't know, at a glance, what that comment was about. Yes, I see there is a link to the question or answer to which the comment is attached, but it would be nice if more information were provided right there in the timeline.

Answer 17

I was playing around with a possible layout for the "timeline" view . (see below)

(This mockup is a bit crude but, hopefully, you get the idea)

Between the newest, oldest, and votes tab, there is now a timeline tab.

Here are the design highlights:

• The timeline display is designed to look as much as possible like the SO's current Q&A pages and revision history, only in timeline order. This should make it easier for the users to understand (and much less design work for the SO team).
• Each revision shows the votes received for that revision (disable voting, of course).
• Edited posts, title, and tag changes use the same display style as SO's revision history.
• The posts a sorted in chronological order (oldest first). There should probably be a "reverse order" link to display newest first.
• Comments are grouped under the post (or revision) they apply to (per my suggestion here).

The individual posts might need a little better labeling to make everything more clear but this is the basic idea:

---

Answer 18

I feel like the current design is overwhelming me with data, especially for large questions with plenty of activity. There's so much data there, almost raw, unfiltered. This monster timeline, for instance shows me screen upon screen of downvotes, upvotes, almost without context, comments that have no meaning without knowing where they were in relation to all the other comments.

Maybe I'm just picky, but it's hard for me to see the utility of this. For small questions you can simply follow the question and not bother with a timeline, for large questions there's too much data and it makes it hard to use. Either way, its usefulness is hard to see. However, if the design was somehow tweaked, it could prove useful. Robert C. Cartaino is onto something with his design.

Answer 19

Since it still hasn't got promoted to a normal feature, and received its own link somewhere (to me the natural place would be replacing the "latest activity" which currently links to the question like the title) here are two ways we can have it on the browser, using scripts (thanks to @random):

We can use the javascript bookmarklet made by @balpha:

javascript:window.location.href=window.location.href.replace(/questions\/(\d+)\/.*$/,"posts/$1/timeline");

Or we can use the greasemonkey script (direct link to install it) posted by @S.Mark.

I personally prefer my personalized and reduced version of the script even while it probably takes more memory than the bookmarklet, though I can't find it under chrome processes. I just don't have a bookmarks tab on any browser I use.

Answer 20

I checked out the timeline on this post and saw that the last date showing is Feb 9, when as of this moment we are still on the 8th (I checked server time: 2010-02-08 22:32:14Z).

Answer 21

As disccused on this Meta question here, and demonstrated by:

• http://meta.stackoverflow.com/posts/34772/timeline
• https://superuser.com/posts/54108/timeline

(and countless others, I'm sure), a poke from the Community user does not display in the timeline. Probably should, because sometimes it's nice to know that your question was pushed back to the front page to get more attention.