Comment voting works good if the server is healthy, but if it errors on saving comments the user can easily stay unaware of it.
Reproduce:
Make a comment upvote or downvote (initiates a POST to /api/comments/v1/vote).
The UI immediately changes a gray thumbs up into a black one, like it was cast, everything looks normal.
Scroll to next comment almost immediately, as a normal user would do.
Repeat the process, make like 5-10 votes in under 2 min.
Result scenario 1: I keep the tab open. After 2 min since the first comment vote the GUI learns that it failed. The UI sometimes scrolls up to start of the comments list and shows an error:
Error: The server encountered an unexpected error, please contact Politeia administrators and inform the api/comments error code:
I say "sometimes" because I don't remember it always happening. I could have interrupted that auto-scroll with my own scrolling.
In the end I'm left with an error but I don't see which of my actions (comment votes) failed and need to be retried later. All failed votes are merged in this one error.
Result scenario 2: I close the tab before the UI knows the votes failed. In this case I will never learn about the failures.
Decision making behind the current implementation is captured in #1792 and #2517.
I suggest to tweak this to prevent the user from being unaware of failed votes. A good starting point may be to reduce the timeout when the vote is considered failed because 2 minutes feels too long. Then maybe add some red exclamation marks near the thumbs up/down icons that would show exactly which actions have failed.
Comment voting works good if the server is healthy, but if it errors on saving comments the user can easily stay unaware of it.
Reproduce:
/api/comments/v1/vote).Result scenario 1: I keep the tab open. After 2 min since the first comment vote the GUI learns that it failed. The UI sometimes scrolls up to start of the comments list and shows an error:
I say "sometimes" because I don't remember it always happening. I could have interrupted that auto-scroll with my own scrolling.
In the end I'm left with an error but I don't see which of my actions (comment votes) failed and need to be retried later. All failed votes are merged in this one error.
Result scenario 2: I close the tab before the UI knows the votes failed. In this case I will never learn about the failures.
Decision making behind the current implementation is captured in #1792 and #2517.
I suggest to tweak this to prevent the user from being unaware of failed votes. A good starting point may be to reduce the timeout when the vote is considered failed because 2 minutes feels too long. Then maybe add some red exclamation marks near the thumbs up/down icons that would show exactly which actions have failed.