Meaningful conversation happens when everyone in the room has heard each other’s thoughts, and a flat, linear timeline has always been the best way to make that possible on Discourse. But flat doesn’t fit every community. In larger, faster-moving forums, thousands of replies on a single timeline make it impossible for anyone to keep up. That’s why we’ve been cautiously experimenting with a fully nested reply view this year, and we think it’s a great fit for communities that have outgrown the flat format.
What started as an experimental plugin, shifted to a project shipping directly in Discourse. Here is a peak at what a nested topic looks like at the moment:
When a specific post is linked to (from a share link or notification), we have a single-thread view:
Enable it on your site
The site settings to enable this feature are available in the admin interface. Navigate to the “Nested Replies” section to control the feature, default sort modes, max depth, and more.
Roadmap
At the time of writing, it’s early days for nested replies. The roadmap is not fully fleshed out. A few things we know we will do:
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Better mobile experience
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Rethink the topic timeline for nested view. At the moment there is no timeline on topics while in nested replies mode
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Add at least one new ordering mode for posts with age decay, similar to our “Hot” for topic lists.
Limitations
- When nesting is enabled for a category, pre-existing topics stay in flat mode. Each topic can individually toggled from the admin wrench, but there is currently no way to convert an existing category to nested mode.
We’d love your feedback
We need your feedback and experience using this feature to help inform it’s development. If this looks like a good fit for your community, give it a go, and tell us what you and your users think!
