Currently the main problem I have is just that this is still too buggy to use, when I scroll around it randomly jumps to different locations on the page for no reason. And I’ve seen a number of people saying that scrolling and even typing is too laggy when this view is enabled for some reason. I haven’t noticed on my M4 Pro MacBook Pro, guess I’m elitist.
Browsing a test topic on my forum now, I did finally notice this exists (in the form of a dot next to the timestamp) but I think this is too subtle, and also more importantly disappears too quickly when scrolling. I’d probably wish to see that dot stick around until I leave the topic entirely and come back to it again later.
I wonder how we’d feel about a “jump to next unread comment” button floating at the bottom when returning to a topic? Maybe that is too confusing though.
On a positive note, I really like how deleted comments are handled, and I wish they worked similar to this in regular threads. We get some complaints about moderation not being transparent enough with the current system.
Honestly, one of the things I like most about this nested replies system is that it forces people to reply to posts properly. Nested replies makes doing this…
…a lot easier IMO. Currently at least on my forum, I feel like people hit the reply button on the post they’re replying to like 70% of the time, otherwise they just hit the topic’s reply button even though they’re replying to a specific reply, whereas with nested threads you basically would never do that. I really wish as a moderation tool I had the option to mark a post as a reply to another post.
Furthermore, at least on my forum it is common for people to use the quote feature to reply to multiple posts at once, and this makes splitting off posts into new topics extremely annoying.
Like my very reply here for example, if we wanted to move this reply into new topics about 1) new unread posts in topics, 2) deleted posts & moderation, and 3) the merits of nested threads vs. the current format, this would be challenging to do. Even moreso if a bunch of people reply to this post before we decide to split it off.
With nested replies, if a chain of messages gets long enough we can split it off into its own topic with its own title, etc. no problem, and the “select post + replies” button will always work the way it’s intended to.
Indeed, most common feedback I’ve seen on my forum is that nested replies makes following a post live near-impossible: