The discussion clarifies that Discourse does not natively support true nested or threaded replies. ivanovitch initially believed this was a design limitation but encountered a forum (Asana) displaying collapsed, nested-style replies.
awesomerobot explains that the Asana example is not true nesting; rather, it duplicates later replies to keep them in context with the original post. This feature is controlled by the enable filtered replies view site setting, which can either duplicate posts or temporarily hide intervening posts to simulate a threaded view. However, the core design of Discourse remains flat.
To achieve actual nested reply functionality, rokejulianlockhart suggests two alternatives: using the “Question Answer” plugin, which offers similar collapsing features, or creating a custom plugin. Moin provides a link to a meta discussion titled “Introducing nested replies,” indicating that this feature may be under development or recently introduced, though the previous posts confirm the standard behavior remains non-nested.
I was under the impression that Discourse, by design, can’t support nested or threaded replies to a topic… but I was just using another Discourse forum and saw this:
Does anyone know how this forum – linked here – might have managed to implement this? Would love to be able to have threaded replies collapsed into a drop-down like this!
These aren’t nested replies the way you’d expect from nested commenting systems, these are duplicates of replies that happen later in the conversation. The idea is that this makes it a little easier to see far-flung responses in close context of what they’re replying to.
There’s also an alternative option for this feature that temporarily hides the posts in-between replies rather than duplicating them (which moves away from the appearance of nesting). That site setting is called enable filtered replies view if you’re curious.
All that said, this is still correct.
@ivanovitch, the undermentioned provides almost exactly that:
Otherwise, you may need to create a plugin:
