Introducing nested replies

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67

Honestly I do not follow this argument. The linear method of replying to posts is exactly the same as it is with nested replies, as demonstrated by the fact you can currently convert a topic back and forth between nested and linear without issue.

I am finding that the nested replies view is very nice for initially entering a topic I am unfamiliar with to figure out what people are talking about, or to focus on one specific conversation, or to identify which posts could be split into a new topic (see above); while the chronological view is nice for topics I am actively participating in live. So I’d rather have the option to change the view only on my end depending on what I’m personally doing.

However, I would probably need this to make the above work:

Okay, now I’ve posted thrice so I’ll stop replying here for now.

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68

I think you are very close to that. The Enable new composer actions[1] upcoming change added support for selecting a different reply as the one the user replied to. You can also remove the reference to the other post. But I am not sure if adding one when there is none is supported yet. Maybe I just haven’t found the place where you do that.

  1. ↩︎

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Change "in reply to" when editing
69

Might be nice.. probably not that easy to implement.. I’ll keep it in the back of my mind.

As you noted in your next post, we have the little dot that disappears as you scroll them into view. This is a great idea though, to make it more prominent for nested replies. Noice.

Yep great idea

It shouldn’t, this could be a bug.. or you’re going forward and backwards and forgetting where you are. For nested replies I implemented aggressive model caching so you can go forward/backwards and the scroll position and what is open/collapsed is all still exactly as it was. I think the cache lasts for 10 topic views so it’s possible you revisited, loaded the cache and expected to be back at the top instead of where you were?

Interesting, will look into this.

I’m surprised to hear this. We have some pretty large communities using nested replies now, and I haven’t heard this before. Will keep an eye on it though

I get where you’re going with this, but lets say the chain is 10 levels deep, and the levels all go deep.. sorting by that won’t add any value if the discussion keeps going on in a super deeply nested convo. Unless in this new mode, we autoload the absolute newest threads all the way down to the newest content. I like the idea but not sure about how we would do it.

Ahh I appreciate all the feedback and really liked seeing your forum where you and your users were talking about the feature. A very cool thing to see out in the wild. You’re almost convincing me that it should be an option. I’ll kick it around internally.

I know I didn’t respond to everything you wrote, but it’s all heard. Thanks for testing, talking to your users and giving the feedback over here. Much appreciated :right_facing_fist: :left_facing_fist: . If you find any solid repros for bugginess send it over here.

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70

Possibly? Maybe what is happening is that I will be 10+ deep posts in a thread, then I leave the topic, and when I open the topic again I’m brought to the first post of the last thread I was reading?

If I’m following you correctly anyways. It’s a bit jarring. Maybe I mentally expect this to work like Reddit where the OP at the top is always opened, instead of my reading position being resumed.

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t returning to exactly where I was though. I’ll pay more attention and see if this is what’s indeed happening.

Another similar thing I am experiencing (which may be related) is frequently I will scroll up or down and it jumps back to the same post, like it’s stuck on it. I often have to refresh, or leave and come back.

I’m not sure when/why this happens, I’ll try to reproduce it more consistently.

This is not the only bug I’ve seen, but as far as the “lag” some people reported, I noticed this is mainly people using Tor Browser, or Vanadium on GrapheneOS, both of which will disable JavaScript JIT compilation.

Lockdown Mode on iOS also disables JIT, I wonder if it will be similarly affected. I’ll mess around with it a bit.

Worse performance is definitely expected with JIT disabled, but if it is only happening in these threads and not regular ones, I wonder if you are using some more intensive JavaScript feature that could be optimized. I’ve only ever noticed lag with complex cryptographic computation when JIT is disabled, never a noticeable performance impact on something basic like a forum.

I don’t have a great suggestion either honestly, but it is very annoying to see a topic show up at the top of “Latest” and have no way to see what the latest post actually is. I’ve resorted to clicking the profile of the latest commenter on the homepage and then finding their latest post lol (and I saw another user independently post about using this workaround as well)

71

I can pretty reliably reproduce this by scrolling quickly:

(The post at the end of the recording is the same as the one at the beginning)

This same behavior also happens sometimes when I am not scrolling quickly, when I’m not on my phone, and when I haven’t scrolled very far though (like I reached the bottom of the page in that recording before it happened, but it’s sometimes the case where this happens after only scrolling past 2-3 other posts, just less consistently).

72

I remembered another bug I’ve seen, which is that sometimes nested reply topics will contain replies from entirely different topics. I think this is client-side caching bug because it resolves itself after refreshing.

Another user experienced this as well:

In their screenshot the third reply is from an entirely different topic. But I’ve seen the same behavior myself in a different context too.

I think this is mainly happening when I first enable nested replies on a different topic.