Navigational links to numbered comment pages on a Friends or Recent Entries view
Title
Navigational links to numbered comment pages on a Friends or Recent Entries view
Short, concise description of the idea
I would like to have the navigational links to individual numbered comment pages for entries that have multiple comment pages, so that I can visit particular comment pages directly from a Friends page or a journal's Recent Entries view without having to visit Page 1 to do so.
Full description of the idea
Because of the imposed brevity for the Title and the Summary of this suggestion, my idea is probably not as clear as it should be. Basically, what I have in mind is something similar to what many non-LiveJournal forums offer: the ability to access a particular comment page on an entry with multiple comment pages, without having to go through Page 1.
Here's an example. Say I am viewing an entry with over a thousand comments on my Friends page. I have already read all of the comments on Page 1 of that entry yesterday (or otherwise don't care to read them), but I do want to jump ahead to, say, Page 5 to read the most recent comments. Unfortunately, the only way to get the page 5 without doing a little URL surgery in my browser's address bar is to go directly to the entry itself, which will automatically take me to Page 1. (Yes, I am a lazy git. XD ).
And let's say that this Page 1 exceeds two hundred comments, many of them in deeply nested threads. I... really don't want to have to wait for the page to load and/or process scripting just so that I can use the navigational page links. =P That's a waste of bandwidth and time.
What I have in mind would be to provide a customizable style option to have the navigational numbered page links available on the entry while viewing it in a Friends or Recent Entries page view. Because this would affect a journal's style, this should be completely OPTIONAL, leaving it up to the journal's owner as to whether or not they want these to display. And, of course, this would also apply for ?style=mine; users who view pages with this URL argument and/or those Paid users who have the option set to view all pages in their own journal's style, will be able to see the numbered links (or not), per their own style settings.
Urgh... this was all hard to explain, so I hope it wasn't too confusing. ^^;;
An ordered list of benefits
- Potentially one fewer page load for the user who would be just using Page 1 as a springboard to a later comment page
- More convenience and control for the user
- Potentially less wasted bandwidth if an extremely comment-laden Page 1 is bypassed
- As always, the time and trouble to code this
- An extra option to store in the database
- This might require at least one extra line of content per entry on a Friends or Recent Entries view
- Depending on individual layouts and custom styles, this might have the potential to _break_ some people's Friends or Recent Entries page views
- This might also be possible to do via advanced style customization, without having to integrate it in existing style code (although I have no idea how, not being a Styles guru, and besides, it would only be available for Paid and Permanent users), so it might be seen as more of a styles "ponie," much in the same way as "meme cutters" and "kill files" are
- And others I'm not thinking of