I already found some topics explaining why discourse has no threaded comments.
However, I would like some tips on how others solve the issues I am currently having.
I am looking into migrating our existing forum to discourse. The main use is gathering user feedback (bug reports, feature requests). We get many replies and it is a mess to keep everything organized. And the dev-team does not have the time to read through every single comment, so we end up having to create a word document with the key-takeaways of what has been said in the forum (a huge pain in theâŚ)
So I came to discord expecting that the [summarize topic] feature would help us generate this list automatically, displaying the most liked ideas, but that doesnât seem to always work as expected. Quite often, a well liked comment is a reply to an idea from someone else, so it doesnât work as a filter to display only top-level replies.
Let me try to explain this a bit better.
The first main issue we have, is that multiple users create topics about similar issues. For example 2 different suggestions about the same issue:
- I dont like the color, how about blue;
- I dont like the color, how about red;
This makes it hard to see âWhat is the total number of users that donât like the color?â.
So I am looking for a way to encourage users to create topics in which the topic itself explains the problem, and the proposed solutions are in the comments. Example:
- I dont like the color [post]
-
- I want it blue [comment]
-
- I want it red [comment]
And to be able to hold sub-conversations on each of those suggestions:
- I dont like the color [post]
-
- I want it blue [comment]
-
-
- oh wow I agree [comment reply]
-
-
- I want it red [comment]
-
-
- oh wow I donât agree [comment reply]
-
In other words: If a post has 10 answers, and 100 comments arguing about those answers, I want a way to be able to filter only the answers and see the number of likes each received, without all the replies polluting the view. Not only for me, but also for users to be able to access a post and quickly see all given ideas and âlikeâ the ones they prefer.
Of course, users should be able to dive into replies if they wish too, but the main replies should not be hidden in a see of comments because of that.
What would be a good way to solve this? I have also looked into using Reddit, but the fact that it archives topics automatically after some time, and the horrible search integration, both encourage re-posting of similar topics which, again, makes it pretty hard to know âhow many people have requested something?â. Reddit also has the problem that, while it has the nested comments feature, by default it displays them expanded, instead of just showing the top-level replies sorted by upvotes.
I have been searching for a tool to solve this for months now, Discourse is the closest (and best) I could find but it still doesnât solve this. I am at a total loss
Would love some ideas on how to approach this.