this is a test reply
another reply 20 characters
this is more nesting
more and more nesting
more and more nesting
more and more nesting
more and more nesting
more and more nesting
more and more nesting
more and more nesting
more and more nesting
more and more nesting
We do have sandboxes to play with https://nested-posts-sandbox-2.discourse.group/, https://nested-posts-sandbox-1.discourse.group/
I specifically registered to write this.
Reply chains are the most painful part of forums. To read all the related replies, you have to constantly click to display/jump to parent/reply replies, making it impossible to see everything at once, and sometimes figuring out who’s replying to which message.
Summary
For example, this post iOS 26 bugs with fixed position elements in Discourse - #7 by awesomerobot When you open it, you can’t immediately see which message it’s replying to (you have to click “Load parent post”), the content of the replies (you have to click “1 Reply v”), or if there are more replies to this post and how many (you have to click “Jump to post”).
I’m a master of compromise 
and I came up with this compromise. The main display is a flat forum, but a post with parent/reply has a BUTTON that opens the ENTIRE chain of related posts in a new window, in a thread/tree view, in which this message will be in focus (for example Testing Nested Replies on Meta - #101 by Ed_S (thanks for the implementation, this is what we need!), but make it so that 10 nested / threaded are displayed without clicks (to do this, make the Topic width wider, now 50% of the screen is empty. As an example, 10 nested fit normally in width forum.opennet.ru - "У меня отжали 2 квартиры в Москве с помощью ЭЦП" (81) ; Полная доказательная база аудита мессенджера MAX / Хабр ), if there are more than 10 nested, then “show more” Opens a new window from this point, but displays the two threads before this message and the eight threads after, etc., to avoid reducing the width. For mobile devices, make the 5 nested.)
This is especially useful in a thread with 1,000 posts when you search for a word, find a post, go to it, and it’s not clear which post the answer was to, and you have to click 10 more times to display the parent/reply link.
You can combine this BUTTON with the number of replies and the thread depth display, so it’s clear that the message is within a larger discussion even before opening it in a new tab.
This combines the advantages of a flat forum (easy reading of the entire thread) and a tree-based forum (the context of a specific reply is visible), without forcing the user to constantly click “go to message” and “show reply” links.
Let’s make forums more convenient than instant messengers and social networks to offer better usability and functionality!
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You could create a special wide theme (so that posts occupy 50-60% of the FHD-2K-4K screen width; currently, 30% is too little) for the tree view, so that frequent users can enable it. Or, even better, create two different themes for flat and tree views. I thought the Foundation theme (full-width) should do this, but for some reason, the main width with posts ( <div class="nested-view"> ; <div class="post__row row"> , I found the right way to do this How to increase width of topic - #7 by awesomerobot , but I would like to just choose a theme, without use custom UserStyle) doesn’t increase.
I came up with an improvement to my idea: clicking this button opens the ENTIRE chain of related posts, not in a new tab, but as a block on the right. And everything fits the screen width: on the left is a 10% navigation block, as it currently is, next to it is a 30% block of posts, as it currently is (can be increased to 40%), and on the right is a 50% block in which the nested/threaded ENTIRE chain of related posts will open.
I’ll also ask other participants to respond with some long messages and create 10 levels of nesting to see how it looks, including on a phone.
For testing purposes, and more:
If I write a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong, introductory text here, how easy will it be to read? I don’t think it’s very easy. Therefore, I suggest Testing Nested Replies on Meta - #136 by Dituar creating a wide Theme for the nested model view, here How to increase width of topic - #7 by awesomerobot with the following parameters:
:root {
--d-max-width: 3000px;
--topic-body-width: 2000px;
}
looks and reads quite well with 11 nested threads on a 2K screen. And limit the nested threads to 10 threads. If there are more 10 threads, clicking “show more” opens a new window from this point, but displays the two threads before this message and the eight threads after, etc., to avoid reducing the width.
This is a test of the response to this message Testing Nested Replies on Meta - #137 by Dituar , I wonder how it will be displayed.
It turns out that this topic already has one with a lot of nesting (and I missed it, scrolled through it, because the [(+) 36 replies] button is too inconspicuous, which also needs to be improved) Testing Nested Replies on Meta - #137 by Dituar , but there was no one with a long test.
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