Meaningful conversation happens when everyone in the room has heard each other’s thoughts, and a flat, linear timeline has always been the best way to make that possible on Discourse. But flat doesn’t fit every community. In larger, faster-moving forums, thousands of replies on a single timeline make it impossible for anyone to keep up. That’s why we’ve been cautiously experimenting with a fully nested reply view this year, and we think it’s a great fit for communities that have outgrown the flat format.
What started as an experimental plugin, shifted to a project shipping directly in Discourse. Here is a peak at what a nested topic looks like at the moment:
The site settings to enable this feature are available in the admin interface. Navigate to the “Nested Replies” section to control the feature, default sort modes, max depth, and more.
Roadmap
At the time of writing, it’s early days for nested replies. The roadmap is not fully fleshed out. A few things we know we will do:
Better mobile experience
Rethink the topic timeline for nested view. At the moment there is no timeline on topics while in nested replies mode
Add at least one new ordering mode for posts with age decay, similar to our “Hot” for topic lists.
Limitations
When nesting is enabled for a category, pre-existing topics stay in flat mode. Each topic can individually toggled from the admin wrench, but there is currently no way to convert an existing category to nested mode.
We’d love your feedback
We need your feedback and experience using this feature to help inform it’s development. If this looks like a good fit for your community, give it a go, and tell us what you and your users think!
OMG YES. excellent timing too. i am migrating a forum to a new server with 2-container tonight and i can’t wait to turn this one for the new one when regular season and our sports pools begin in a couple weeks. this should be a good test use-case too.
it will be so cool to have the options of both flat and embedded discussion - thank you for this @markvanlan and Team.
Just to note: when there are new replies in multiple branches of the tree, it looks like the single-thread view only showed me one at a time. I had to revisit several times, with the unread count going down by one each time.
Yes I do agree with you. This is a limitation for now, and something we will absolutely keep thinking about.
The big reason why I chose not to convert historical topics in a category when it is enabled, is that users are likely going to interact differently. In flat mode, the various Reply buttons don’t matter as much. The post is going at the bottom of the topic. I’m not sure users always intentionally press the “right one” that would translate to the nested view.
Basically I worry that admins will enable it for historical topics and then suddenly the conversation is unreadable. We’ll keep thinking about it. The easiest change I can think of is when the category setting is toggled, we have a modal popup saying “do you want to apply this to existing topics?”
