289771 - Firebird 1.0.2 newsreader usage improvements w/ threads

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Kimmo Sundqvist]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050403 Firefox/1.0.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050403 Firefox/1.0.2

There are many interrelated suggestions I'd like to make for Mozilla Firebird. 
These are about the newsreader functionality.

1. An easy way to display the group as threads.  Now I must go into a submenu. 
I have no elegant suggestions for how to handle this.  Maybe a toolbar button or
a keyboard shortcut?

2. Changing sort order disables showing as threads.  I always feel this is an
accident, and that sort order and threaded/not threaded should be independent of
each other.

3. After changing to threads, all threads are expanded.  This inevitably leads
everyone to collapse all threads (from a submenu, though I again and again
discover that it has a keyboard shortcut too) and then re-expand those that are
needed.  After changing to threaded view, all threads should be collapsed by
default.

4. The whole thread is either expanded or collapsed.  I most of the time, with
long and complicated discussions, have the need to collapse just a part of a
gigantic thread that I've already gone through, to make the rest of the thread
easier to handle.

5. When entering a newsgroup, I've had problems with Thunderbird expanding a
thread I wasn't reading the last time I was in that group.  Often the thread
that gets expanded is the biggest one, and most of the time I've had nothing to
do with it.

This is not related to whether "Remember the last selected message" is set or
unset in General preferences.

I tried quitting and reloading Thunderbird.  I picked a newsgroup.  A giant
thread was in expanded state.  I picked another newsgroup.  There were no
expanded threads.  Went back to the first one, and Thunderbird didn't expand the
giant thread anymore, but sooner or later it will do it again.  This is
unpredictable, and thus a nuisance.  If I ever discover which feature it is, I
hope I'm able to disable it.

6. When the subthread collapse/expand is implemented, I think the user will see
from the text style if it is read, unread or partially both, as is now the case
with whole threads.  I'd like to also see if the subthread contains messages
written by me.  Now I only see if I have replied to the message at the root of
the (sub)thread.  I'm not suggesting that the two signals be mixed in any way. 
The green arrow is good, and the other signal should be clearly different.

7. I think it should be configurable whether the group opens in "last remembered
state" or all threads collapsed.  I'd always use the latter.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Read newsgroups and rely heavily on threads
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
Actual results: Some difficulties

Expected Results:  
Expected results: Some improvements

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Reporter:
You reported several different issues in one bug, this makes this bug invalid.
Please report only one issue/bug report and you must also search before you file
a bug.

Please also read http://www.mozilla.org/quality/bug-writing-guidelines.html

-> invalid