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.
