I see discussions about removing threading from comments, and I'd like to make a plea for keeping this feature.
For flat view comments, which are useful when trying to track what is new in an active discussion, people can't see who responded to whom. A common response is to get quite verbose, and start quoting text extensively, which adds a lot of noise. If you keep the the reply button and track parent ids, you could present a link on any replies that expands in place to show the original comment. I'm soon to implement such a feature on a site I'm working on, and would be happy to make a module out of it.
And of course, threaded views have their place too, especially for reading archives.
In general, it seems like a loss of useful information.
Are there other negatives besides the 'new' link problem associated with threading that you want to eliminate? I know I'm new here, and have probably missed out on some good discussion.
Comments
Crickets...
I'm guessing people are weary of hashing out this issue. Can someone at least point me at past discussions about it? I'm trying to understand the motivation behind eliminating threading.
.
catch or merlinofchaos could answer this better than me but they're busy and I have a moment...
1) Threaded discussions encourage side discussions which can derail a thread.
2) Coming back to a large ongoing discussion and trying to pick out all the spots where you left off reading is tricky. Sure they get marked new but scanning through for the new marks isn't always easy. Plus they get lost when you move to page 2.
3) Calculating the link to the first unread comment is a lot harder, maybe even impossible.
4) Moving / deleting some comments in a threaded discussion makes a mess.
5) If you have the forum set visually to flat but threaded underneath, it is very confusing to users why they can sometimes edit their comment and other times not depending on what reply link others have used.
6) Retaining threading will make the move to forum posts as nodes more difficult because you can't use a straight timestamp based list.
7) Really deep subthreads end up with a very narrow column of squished post because it runs out of horizontal room.
That's all I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more reasons under the hood but that's what I know from being a user on d.o as well as working on AF.
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
Thanks alot, Michelle. Very
Thanks alot, Michelle. Very helpful.
Those all make sense in the context of a forum system. I get it.
The site I'm working on has an existing culture more like a chat room, flat list, with a lot of informality and desire to avoid structure. My goal has been to add some unobtrusive encoding, since there are lot of gems of information buried in the chaos, and who was replying to whom is useful.
The culture also strongly opposes deletions by anyone other than the moderator, so that's not an issue.
While these are my problems, not drupal's, I'm wondering if we could make it an option to retain threading if one wants? There may be others who have need for the feature too, and I don't see a big performance or complexity hit from this if it's inactive.
BTW, I'd like to help wherever I can on this. While not an experienced drupal dev, I have been writing code for a long time, and would like to contribute to what I can see is a pretty darn cool community.
Retaining
I don't think there's any question of retaining threading. As much as some of us would love to dump it, there's far too many users, including drupal.org itself using it. So whatever solution we come up with is going to have to work with threading whether we like it or not.
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
Google limits threading to
Google limits threading to depth 1...
------------------
Sometimes interesting things appears on http://litwol.com