Display a placeholder for long time gaps between messages about braid HOT 12 OPEN

Hi everyone, Happy to take this on. Will setup Braid over the weekend and take a crack at it.

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• I think changing from "06-06-2020" to "Yesterday" is fine (probably good to have the full date in the elements title so it shows on hover); we already do something similar for the message times so you can reuse or modify the code if relevant.
• I think there may be value for adding something extra when there is a long delay between messages (ie. having both "2 days later..." and "yesterday", where the "2 days later" would only show for delays greater than, say, 2 days)

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I think this is obviated by #172

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Still think this is relevant... The date divider doesn't make it immediately obvious that day.... 13 days later, someone necroed a thread.

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The code would likely be added around here: https://github.com/braidchat/braid/blob/master/src/braid/core/client/ui/views/thread.cljs#L260

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Part of me is considering whether or not these should have a little whimsy, and be done in the style of SpongeBob time-cards :P https://spongebob.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_time_cards

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I think I will give it a go in my spare time.

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Hey @PiotrKurnik , jeelshah on Braid was interested on working on this change. I'm going to ping him via email and see if he still wants to do it, but if not, it's yours.

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Sure, I was just browsing this issue recently ;-)

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So, a couple questions and clarifications about the feature. As I understand it, the feature is to:

display a human friendly time placeholder for long gaps between messages.

1. Should we display placeholders between gaps of messages or the last two messages?
2. Should replace the yyyy-MM-dd in the dividers to a [Name of day], [Name of month] dd format?

Research

After researching the topic a little, I've found that Slack, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger either show no placeholders as is the case for WhatsApp / Messenger or in the case of Slack, show only a placeholder between the last two messages. For instance, it will show that "time" difference between the last message and the second last message is "yesterday" otherwise, it will simply show the time stamp.

Thoughts

I think design wise, it's probably better to show only the time difference between the last two messages OR if we want to always show a placeholder then to show it for longer periods at a lower bound of 2/3 days and for time periods less than the lower bound, we show the divider.

My inclination is towards the last two messages. Suppose, we have an active thread where people post every 3 / 4 days then each message will be preceded by "3 days later", "4 days later" etc. and this will clutter the UI and I think, make for an uneasy UX. Also, we would have to find a way to display the date of the messages as well.

Related

On a related note, it would be nice to replace the divider yyyy-MM-dd with a [Name of day], [Name of month] dd and if the year of the message is not the current year then [Name of day], [Name of month] dd [year]. This will help with the UX of looking at longer time periods because it's much easier to work with June 6th than 06-06-2020.

"Demos"

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Ok, great! I'll implement the "X days later" along with "Yesterday". Sorry, just to clarify one thing about "full date in the elements title ..." So, we're going to have "X days later" or "Yesterday" and then on hover we show the date of the message -- right?

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