Forum Subthreading Please

[groove-agent]

I realize that this would probably require new BB software, but this forum really needs collapsable/expandable subthreads, like what Youtube has. This of course means if someone replies to your comment, it's located right underneath it, and not pages later where it would be missed. This could also condense the amount of replies, lowering the amount of pages.

Sometimes I feel like a commenting on a hot topic is pointless. Only a few people will read it unless it's at the very beginning or very end. I think something like what youtube has would be great.

Thanks for Macrumors, it has been my favourite website for years.

 

[AlliFlowers]

Oh no! I would never take the time to go through all that. I read every post in a thread that interests me.

 

[groove-agent]

Oh no! I would never take the time to go through all that. I read every post in a thread that interests me.

I don't think you understand what I mean. I don't mean one large thread and subthreads for the whole site. For one topic, you have threads, and when someone replies to a reply, it appears right below which can be expanded and collapsed if you wish to follow that repliers response to the original poster.

 

[C DM]

I don't think you understand what I mean. I don't mean one large thread and subthreads for the whole site. For one topic, you have threads, and when someone replies to a reply, it appears right below which can be expanded and collapsed if you wish to follow that repliers response to the original poster.

To some degree that kind of thing is done with quotes here.

 

[Eric5h5]

Threaded and linear topics each have advantages and disadvantages. I wouldn't say the forum "needs" threaded topics; that's a preference on your part, which I don't share. For example, sometimes you want to have multiple replies in one post because they're related—that's not possible with threaded topics; you need to reply to everybody individually, so some of what you're saying gets lost. A big problem that nobody has really solved with threaded topics is what to do about a long series of replies descended from a particular post. For one thing you can't keep nesting indents forever since you run out of space. I've seen that the typical solution is to stop after a few levels, but after that it gets confusing as to who's replying to what since there obviously isn't a quote mechanism.

Overall I would say that threaded topics are suited to more casual areas where it's not likely that any given post will have too many responses. They're pretty terrible for technical and in-depth topics, which rules out a big chunk of this forum.

--Eric

 

[groove-agent]

Yes I can see your point. I would say you could limit the thread to one sublevel but you're right, sometimes people just reply to a reply for convenience and then the conversation becomes fragmented and as you said "some of what you're saying gets lost". At the same time, with the current format I'm pretty sure most people don't read most of the responses in the centre of a 40+ page thread so the end result is really the same.

I'm sure someone will figure out a way to do it at some point.

 

[WildCowboy]

vBulletin had a threaded view, but very few people used it here. It also wasn't perfect, because depending on how someone replied to a thread, the system might not know the post was in response to another post. For example, if you didn't quote the post you were responding to or didn't use the reply button on that specific post, there's no way to associate the new post as a reply to it.

And yes, multi-quote wreaks havoc on threading.