On my forum, I don’t see a “view as flat” option like in the example screenshot.
For me, I need flat as the global default, with nested being an optional view that users can use when they want to, with flat always being readily available.
As long as it’s a “view as nested” button which people can toggle back off, this would be great. A per-user setting to switch to nested as the default would also be great as long as they can switch individual topics or all topics back to flat at will.
Without adequate controls to toggle between views, I’ll have to stick to flat.
I actually completely removed the view as flat option. It was around for our internal testing so we could compare flat vs nested view easily. We saw no value in keep it around so it’s now gone.
Reddit-style UI is good, but I see another design like:
- A: ...
- B: ...
- C → B: ...
- D → C: ...
In China, this pattern is used by almost all forums / social media platforms. It also collapses all nested posts except for the first one. I think it can avoid distracting and can be an option
Hello,
I find this feature really great, greatly improving the readability of a conversation.
However, though I may have missed a setting, I have two remarks:
When a reply is moderated, a high-level user (moderator, admin, etc.) no longer sees the moderated messages (automatically or not) grayed out. They appear normally. The grayed-out mode for these messages is a real plus for quickly identifying them.
When I reply to a conversation, a filter hides the formatting bar of the reply, also hiding the option to attach an image, for example:
Hey Lilly - totally random question - what Theme are you using in your nested reply screen shot above (its more I like the aesthetics so want to d something similar).
@markvanlan what do you think about the idea of making those settings per-category?
I have in mind that folks might want to configure them in different ways for different use cases (e.g. max: 1, cap: true for more of a “post voting” use case, or max: 10, cap: false for more of a free form high traffic commenting use case)
Is that something you foresee needing as well? Or are you more skeptical we need anything more than site settings here?
I think your instinct is absolutely right, and that will be the eventual reality. There are so many use cases: voting, AMAs, “dairy diary style”, to name a few. Each of these will likely need their own values for these settings in addition to new settings that don’t exist yet.
It would be technically easy to implement per-category settings for these. I’d like to make sure it’s easy for admin to configure this in a way that is not overwhelming.
Before that, the glaring hole is that there is no current way to backfill topics in a specific category to all be nested (in the UI that is, of course it can be done with direct server access). When you enable nesting for a category it only affects new topics, not existing ones.
At first I thought it was amusing that this announcement wasn’t in nested-reply format; then realized you weren’t ready to reformat the whole News and Events > Announcements category.
Here’s some resources I collected when new to Discourse and understanding the flat model: Jeff’s canonical take:
A nicely-done outside note:
Why Discourse uses “Topics” rather than “Threads” (from 2017, before `nested-replies’ was invented.
Lastly, while I may implement nested-replies, I will sorely miss infinite scrolling. I have a nice mouse with a handy free-spinning scroll wheel, but nothing beats grabbing the infinite scroll bar slider and quickly moving through a topic.
One challenge with this from a moderation perspective is that our moderators like to read every post in a topic. This seems hard to do with the nested reply format, so an optional chronological flat view (restricted to certain groups maybe?) could still be useful.
At the very least, maybe there could be an option for New to sort the threads by the newest reply in the topic rather than newest top-level thread.
Some other feedback:
It would be nice if I collapse a thread, it’d stay collapsed when I reopen the topic in the future
It’d also be nice if new replies since the last time I opened the topic were highlighted
I wish the “X new replies” button was always visible, stickied to the top of the page like where the “sort by” selector is, instead of only when I scroll all the way up to the top.
Opening a topic navigates to a seemingly random part of the topic?
Even when clicking browser notifications about new replies, sometimes new replies don’t appear until I refresh the page. I think this is especially (only?) the case if I click a notification from the topic when I have the topic open.
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:
