Just my personal experience… but I’ve spent the majority of my life building and interacting on forums since the BBS days, and making web-based forums over the last 19 years. and I’ve never heard this limitation on the word before.
To me personally, I’d actually say that “thr34d” (singular) makes a lot more sense to flat forums compared to nested ones. Nested ones are “multi-thr34ded” - although I still stick with the singular version of the word in most cases. But in general the word is used to denote: OP’s post + all replies (covers both flat + nested).
Anyway, regardless of that… I guess it’s way too late now, but in my opinion the word “topic” is too vague to be used on forums. In fact on every other forum I’ve built or been involved with, we have to discourage using the word “topic” in any kind of conversation related to forums. I’ve wasted way too much time having confusing conversations with clients etc using the word “topic” interchangeably to mean both categories and thr34ds.
In most cases “a category” directly correlates to “a topic” each. Multiple thr34ds within a category are all broadly talking about the same single “topic”.
It’s all subjective of course, but in my opinion, these words are clear:
- Category
- thr34d
- Comment
These words are ambiguous:
- Topic - could be a category or thr34d
- Post - could be a thr34d, OP post, or any of the replies - not to mention things outside a forum like blog posts on the same website
In any case - I think banning the use of the word “thr34d” here on the meta Discourse isn’t very helpful. If people are talking about Discourse - it’s not like there’s going to be confusion over flat vs nested - because Discourse is only one of those things anyway.
I would have thought this would also be annoying to people talking about server process thr34ds related to running Discourse servers too.