Truncated posts with "show more" (NOT quoted sections)

[AromanticSpices]

I've just seen this on posts - having to click "show more" if the post is longer than a handful of lines.

Please please bin this off! I want to scroll and read posts without having to constantly click!

And let's not discourage longer nuanced posts by implying they breach some (very short) length limit...

It's awful.
(NB I'm not talking about quoted sections... literally just text posted in a post)

I really don't like the language you're using here.

Seeing all of every post isn't "seeing everything expanded by default" - it's just the absolute bog standard normal way to view MN and has been for what, 25 years? Please don't try and frame it as some weird choice that you're willing to accommodate if you must.

@AmeliaPMumsnet, I agree with some of the above posters, on two points:

This should not be a feature that is there by default, but you have to switch it off. That means that new users, or those who were not part of these conversations, may not know that they can switch it off - and, due to the way that the truncation works, (breaking at paragraph breaks) may not even notice that some posts are being truncated - the “see more” button isn’t exactly huge and contrasty and in your face, and people with vision issues (for example) could easily miss it was even there.

I also agree that the way you are framing this issue is problematic. The full post is the default. That is what the poster wrote, and that is what should be - and certainly always has been on MN - shown. The truncated post is something you are imposing on us, for some reason.

I think the problems come when MNHQ senior leaders for some reason (I assume motivated by the promise of financial gain) listens to people who don’t use the site, in order to make changes they think will bring in bigger bucks to them. Never mind the site already turns millions in profit each year. THey don’t want to listen to users.

But what annoys me is that this mindset treats MN as a commodity like any other or a chat site like any other. As PPs have repeatedly said it is attractive because it’s NOT just another quick fire rage baity argument site. There is expertise being shared and personal generosity with time and support in all kinds of area. There are jokes and there is solidarity.

this is the life blood of the site. And the posters are the geese that lay the golden eggs for the owners and keep the readers coming. For absolutely free.
so MNHQ please stop making the site harder to use if the posters tell you it’s making it harder to use,. and if the readers (you want to encourage both) say the same- as is happening here.

It’s a really exploitative bad look otherwise given the ecosystem of how the site content creation actually works. I wish the MN owners would see themselves as guardians of something really precious; and would set it up as a trust of some kind rather than try to extract every last £££ out of the business all the time. That risks the sustainability of MN which is an amazing resource to have built and is an absolutely amazing professional legacy for anyone to leave. I’m grateful it exists and wish it to have a secure future.

This. And yes I'm quoting a full post as its important people see this.

We are being gaslit to believe a normal post is somehow a special treat that we don't need to expand rather than the norm.

If the owners sold it to an Employee Ownership Trust for example, they’d save 50-100% of CGT so it wouldn’t be a completely mad and altruistic move on their part.

I don’t knew how the company is structured now but private equity people tend to make the kind of changes that alienate the current clients and in a business like MN, the current clients IS the business.

I see us more as the products than the clients.

Unless you meant the advertisers when you said clients and I misunderstood.

Maybe it’s both? A cycle in which we provide the products for free (posts) and we return to read the posts on site (as clients of the business) and refresh the conversation (product) constantly. The product is literally created out of our feedback as customers or clients (if we are not put off or impeded by the policies of MNHQ). When it works, it’s a genius product for a business owner. That’s why I don’t understand why MNHQ doesn’t appear to give more weight to responding to feedback about usability from its posters.

Advertisers give the site owners money in return for clients seeing their ad messages. I’d imagine most of us read a lot more widely on the site than we post, e en if we post regularly, so it’s a great opportunity for advertisers here.

But if you look at Site Stuff, there are very long running threads about video ads making the view jump to different pages or being blamed for forcing unwanted page refreshes which wipe out unpublished posts while they’re being written. It does feels as though serious usability problems for clients affecting reading and posting are not prioritised over advertisers’ wants, which feels very short-sighted.

I note there's been no reply to the many PP who raised accessibility issues.

Mn pimp us out to advertisers. 😁

Hi all,

Thank you again for all the feedback you shared about truncated posts. We switched the feature off while we reviewed what you told us and made some changes.

We heard loud and clear that collapsing ordinary posts was too disruptive. It interrupted the flow of threads, meant repeatedly clicking or tapping to read posts, and made the site harder to use for some people. At the same time, many of you told us that collapsing lengthy posts within quotes can be helpful.

With that in mind, we've changed the feature so that only long posts within quotes are truncated. This change is now live on the site.

Thanks again for taking the time to explain what wasn't working, and for bearing with us while we made these changes.

That makes a thread unreadable though. Trying to follow a conversation when you dont understand the context of the reply someone is making is impossible.

Thank you, this sounds like a great solution.

This is how it's always worked. It is more difficult to navigate on a phone, but I find it can be OK if someone does it well. Like rather than just saying "I agree with likelysuspect" say something like "I thought what likelysuspect said about her experience with threads becoming unreadable was really interesting because...

Like just the tiniest bit of context so that it makes sense, and then if someone wants to see what you said in full they can always scroll back up or use find in page to find the full post.

@BridgetYourFortyDaysAreUp if you want to indicate which poster you're referring to it can also work well just to bold their name or part of their name e.g. if I said something like "I agree with what Bridget said above"

I turned off tag notifications ages ago anyway so I expect if people are bothered by it, they will have done too. You get a notification by default for both quotes and tags, so if you're using one as a replacement for the other, then it shouldn't be any more or less annoying.

Brilliant! This is good news. Thanks for this.