Forum bug: in-progress reply is deleted if parent is edited

peterdedecker said:

Garmin didn't develop the forum software (and I think it's also unlikely that they alter parts of it).

I realize that thanks. However I assume Garmin is paying the owners of the forum platform for support, or at the very least, they are in a better position to have their voices heard.

I'm also posting here for visibility, as the default sorting order of the bug reports forum makes it pretty easy for anything but the very latest bug report to disappear.

peterdedecker said:

I think your chance of seeing forum bugs fixed is bigger if you either post it in the bug forum

Yep, I'm going to make a post there too, although the Connect IQ Bug Reports forum doesn't seem like the right place either. The old forums had a dedicated sub-forum for forum bug reports - I wish something like that still existed.

FlowState Thank you for posting your experience with this. If you could summarize a rough estimate, how often would you say this occurs? I agree completely with the frustration aspect you posted, but this sounds like a very specific scenario. Even still, we will look at this internally to see if there are any improvements we can make to minimize these occurrences. 

Thanks for the quick response Garmin-Blake. You're correct that it's a specific scenario, but it feels it's neither uncommon nor strictly regularly occurring. It's more like a traffic jam or a long line at the supermarket -- it doesn't happen every time, but it happens enough times to be annoying.

The specific situation that leads to this (in my experience) is when at least two posters are highly engaged / active in the same thread at the same time. In this case, replies and edits are basically happening in real time (as if this were Slack or Discord), and that's when this bug is triggered. Another contributing factor is when the subject matter is more complex / controversial than usual, which is when people usually feel the need to make edits to clarify themselves.

I'd say in the last couple of weeks, I've experienced this in 2 or 3 threads. For 1 of the threads, it happened more than once, as replies and edits were happening pretty quickly.

To me this is another class of forum bug where you have to "be careful how you use it". Another example is that certain text will still be rejected by the forums (whether it's code or just complex formatted text copied from a webpage).

Garmin-Blake said:

Even still, we will look at this internally to see if there are any improvements we can make to minimize these occurrences. 

While that would be greatly appreciated, to me that sounds like a workaround.

Ideally, the forum platform devs would just fix the root cause - i.e. it's great that the parent comment is re-rendered with the edit in real time, but not so great that this process blows away the reply you are currently typing.

I'd also say there's a lot of other little usability issues, too.

Like when you click "More" beside a comment, the pop-up menu can take a few seconds to appear. The user might be tempted to left-click on More again, thinking that the first attempt failed for some reason. Unfortunately, at this point, the pop-up menu might have finally appeared, and the first entry (which is usually under the mouse cursor if you haven't moved it) is "Report as Abusive". The worst part here is that if you accidentally click "Report as Abusive", there's no confirmation prompt -- it just does it and says "thanks for submitting your report" (or whatever.)

TL;DR it's too easy to accidentally report a comment as abusive. Things like that should always have a confirmation prompt, especially if there's an issue which makes it very easy to accidentally trigger.

This is another case where I feel I have to be very careful to use the forums "correctly". When I click "More", I literally hold my breath and wait five seconds for the pop-up menu to appear. I make sure I *don't* click again (as one might instinctively do), otherwise I might report my own comment as abusive.

EDIT: it seems that this behavior might have been changed so that Delete is the option that's under the mouse cursor by default. But the issue still exists if you click on More for someone else's comment.

It's also pretty annoying for various reasons (*) that the code editor is in a separate dialog, as opposed to being able to enter code blocks directly in the main editor (a la Markdown). And there's no way to have inline code (like Markdown).

(*) e.g. There's no way to quickly edit multiple blocks of code. And the mobile experience of all the editor controls is not great.