Answer display length
complete
Kpopalypse
I often write long answers to my readers' questions. I'd love for the "read the entire answer" display button to be disabled and for all readers visiting my retrospring answers to always be able to see the full text of each entire answer, regardless of its length. That button adds a whole lot of annoying extra navigation for people reading my page, or for me reading someone else's page, as I have to click in to each long answer to see all of it (even if it's only one or two extra characters that I didn't catch in the shortened version - SO annoying!), and then click back out to resume reading the other answers. Please just let us see all the text for each answer!
pixeldesu
complete
This has been adjusted. Long answers now still have a button, but instead of taking you to a new page, it unfolds the answer right away.
Karina Kwiatek
in progress
pixeldesu
Not exactly giving this a hard "no", but we'll be going for a different approach.
With adjusting the allowed lengths for questions as well we want to adjust the shortening in general, and make it a "in-feed" thing.
So, there will be a button or something similar, as there is right now, but it will unfold the answer without navigating off to the detail page for the answer.
The shortening aspect is important, because not having a visual limiter just allows people to make endlessly long answers that would take apart feeds and making logic solely for profiles isn't a good way forward. At the same point, if someone wasn't interested in a particular question/answer on your profile, getting to the next one would require huge amounts of scrolling as well.
Kpopalypse
pixeldesu: Thanks for your reply. While it's defintiely not the answer I or many other users wanted, this approach makes sense and I understand the reasoning, what you're suggesting would certainly still be far preferable to how it is now. I feel like the threshold before "read the entire answer" kicks in is still way too short though. I'd love to see the cutoff for answer lengths before the button appears (whether going to a "new page" or an "in-feed") to be at least triple or quadruple what it is now, I think that's a good threshold, as I'd rarely need to type more than that, and it would still be easy enough to scroll through (when talking about reading text, a scroll is almost always better design than a click) plus it would also be more than enough to mitigate the negative effects of people who might be tempted to troll with endless answers.
pixeldesu
Kpopalypse: We will most definitely extend the limit, and as it will be more visual, the new limit will be based on lines, instead of currently a certain number of characters, so there should be more text visible initially!
Kpopalypse
pixeldesu: Great thanks! When is this scheduled to happen? If it's part of some massive site redesign, can we at least get a doubling or tripling of the word count before the button kicks in while we wait for the bigger changes? I'm really feeling the PAIN of all this extra navigation in the meantime! Every time I answer a question with more than just one unconstructive sentence I feel like I have to apologise to my readers for making them do all this extra clicking for no reason!
pixeldesu
Kpopalypse: We don't give deadlines on things, because Retrospring is a project maintained by less than a handful of volunteers that work on this in their free time!
The redesign is still somewhat far off and we want to cross other things off the list first, but for the meantime, I made a quick release increasing the answer display length from 255 characters to 640 (almost) trippling it.
This way, displayed answers on feeds are longer than questions again!
Kpopalypse
pixeldesu: OMG thank you pixeldesu heart shape uwu
Lavellyne
OHH i so second this, its really annoying sometimes and i feel like it would be a lot neater!