Cut out the middle comments because they take up too much space

When loading an issue with tons of comments we can cut out the middle group of comments because often it's just a lot to read. No one is going to read an issue with 1000 comments. We need to make our discussions more readable. This is a good start.

Then in the middle we have a button to load the rest of the comments.

cc @sarrahvesselov @JobV @iamphill @filipa

I like it

added issues merge requests labels

I can see the advantage for issues with a lot of comments, but I see some problems UX wise:

1. We are going to loose ctrl+f functionality, which as a user I use often
2. I can see this being a problem for issues with few comments, I want to have all te info right away.
3. As a user I don't like to click several times to get a to a specific comment, it will probably frustrate me and I'll give up looking for it
4. Users don't like to wait for info/functionality. I like to have everything available asap.

Maybe we can achieve a better performance without loosing user experience/functionality. They are already being rendered with Vue, if we remove all the event listeners for old jQuery code, would that help?

From a technical point of view, are we giving up on loading it in chunks or are we doing both?

• We are going to loose ctrl+f functionality, which as a user I use often

We can have a "load all comments" button for those that really want to grep the entire conversation. I think having crappy performance on a 1000-comment thread is a worse problem than lacking the ability to search through all of the comments on the initial page load.

• I can see this being a problem for issues with few comments, I want to have all te info right away.

I think we would only do this when a issue or MR has a lot of comments on it... I'd imagine 50+ at least before we start considering clipping some of them out.

• As a user I don't like to click several times to get a to a specific comment, it will probably frustrate me and I'll give up looking for it

One "load all comments" button would be all it takes. Similar to having a "expand all discussions" that we have for diff notes.

• Users don't like to wait for info/functionality. I like to have everything available asap.

I agree, but not at the expense of performance. I would expect that this would only effect a small percentage of issuable discussions. Not many threads get so large that this would be necessary.

cc @victorwu... I think this will improve performance. All the other Ctrl+F issues I am finding a lot of sites don't care as much about that anymore for huge huge comment threads. e.g. GH. And of course Reddit can't possibly load all comments because that'd be silly. Also Quora... In those situations Ctrl+F is not going to work.

We should be valuing performance over Ctrl+F. Performance is # 1 in our books right now.

changed milestone to %Next 3-6 months

The issue description mentions the page being 'too long to read'. For me, the problem is the ability and time needed to load a page, if not on a fast/reliable connection. Trying to work through Gitlab on mobile Internet can be a real nightmare. Or even regular broadband, if it's not fast. I've just measured a merge request page at 11MB, of which 4MB was cached and 7MB had to be downloaded. If your broadband is 2MBps, that's still 30 seconds with the connect all to yourself. And each comment (of which there were 182) is only a few lines of text; it seems like there ought to be a lot of efficiency savings possible in there somewhere.

mentioned in issue #34587 (moved)

• We are going to loose ctrl+f functionality, which as a user I use often

• I can see this being a problem for issues with few comments, I want to have all te info right away.

• As a user I don't like to click several times to get a to a specific comment, it will probably frustrate me and I'll give up looking for it

• Users don't like to wait for info/functionality. I like to have everything available asap.

I had the same concerns as @filipa when I first read through this issue. @mikegreiling comments did help with some of these concerns. Specifically:

One "load all comments" button would be all it takes. Similar to having a "expand all discussions" that we have for diff notes.

I think we would only do this when a issue or MR has a lot of comments on it... I'd imagine 50+ at least before we start considering clipping some of them out.

I don't like the idea of losing ctrl+f either but I do believe that improving performance is a higher priority. If we do have a 'load all comments' button, will users be able to ctrl+f. or is this an all or nothing?

@sarrahvesselov yes, if a user clicks “load all comments” and then waits for the load to finish, they can ctrl+f through all of them just as before

yes, if a user clicks “load all comments” and then waits for the load to finish, they can ctrl+f through all of them just as before

I can live with that.

added UX label