Re: Mailing list archives – design ideas

On Mon, Dec 14, 2020 at 9:33 AM Michael Christofides
<michael(at)pgmustard(dot)com> wrote:
> In short, the bigger ideas I tried were:
> 1) Reversed the chronology, to start each view with the recent emails

This probably makes sense. For the current month, I am almost always
initially looking for the latest messages. For previous months, I
suspect it doesn't really matter. We already have a
reverse-chronological listing in
https://www.postgresql.org/list/pgsql-hackers/ -- it's reasonable to
do that day-by-day as well. For what it's worth, I don't think the
analogy to top-posting holds--it's a different situation, just that
both happen to involve e-mail and time.

> 2) Grouped by thread (per day)

This is great--it makes it much easier to scan list activity. I do
think there's a bit too much padding in the mock-ups--it looks like
the same archive content would take up a lot more vertical space,
which may not be a good trade-off. The thread titles also sort of fade
into the background with the current styling--I think they could be
more prominent.

> 3) Considered narrower screens

This is nice, but you end up with a lot of empty space on wider
screens. I don't think it really makes sense to have separate columns
here, though. Do you think there's another use of this space that
could work well? If we have a layout that works well on smaller
viewports without compromising the information available on larger
viewports, that seems like a clear improvement.

> A question of what to do with threads across days/months has come up twice already, but I think limiting the grouping per day avoids that issue, whilst not making anything worse.

This seems like a good compromise.