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Oooh I hate that in other fora.
People never, ever get the replies right and the differnt branches get all bollixed. Plus it makes it harder to read with all the indents and outdents and "no I wasn't replying to you, I was replying to him..."
Im not sure how its done in other forums but my idea is that only the thread starter has the option to use it. And its only used for the long running threads where conversations will get so big and confusing anyways.
The thought was brought up in the baseball thread of having a separate Yankees Red Sox thread. I would think rather then start a new thread to make a secondary conversation in the baseball thread to keep the conversations together.
The thought was brought up in the baseball thread of having a separate Yankees Red Sox thread. I would think rather then start a new thread to make a secondary conversation in the baseball thread to keep the conversations together.
Have you tried Hybrid Mode or Threaded Mode in the Display Mode drop-down menu at the top of this page? They give you a hierarchical view of the thread, based on replies.
In this instance, maybe the best thing would be to start a new thread(s) and reference it in the original thread. For something like this, where there might be a lot of Red Sox discussion and a lot of Cubs discussion in addition to the general baseball discusssion, maybe go to the effort of creating the splinter thread and then use the report post button to see if the Mods could put a reference to the new threads in the original post. That way it keeps the general discussion clear, but still lets newcomers know where the more lively Sox discussion went to.
interesting thought, but this forum doesn't have that sort of functionality.
It's a common problem in forums, and I have yet to find a good solution.
full threaded comment systems exist, but they have something to be desired too. I'd love to hear other comments/ideas about it as it's an area I'm very interested in.
arn
It's a common problem in forums, and I have yet to find a good solution.
full threaded comment systems exist, but they have something to be desired too. I'd love to hear other comments/ideas about it as it's an area I'm very interested in.
arn
That's what should happen, in my opinion, if we had such a feature. If I were designing this feature, here's how I might have it work:
Threads can be related in a super-sub (parent-child) way.
When you reply to a thread, you have a choice to "create sub-thread". That starts a new thread, which for posting purposes is completely separate.
But the two threads are linked for forum displays and are always displayed together. When you display the main page of a forum, the New Posts list, or a search result of threads, the sub-threads of a given thread are always shown, indented, following that thread.
You could create sub-sub-threads in the same way, so the forum display would be a tree structure with many levels of indenting.
A user display option would let people suppress the display of sub-threads. A search option would let people limit searches to parent threads vs. all threads.
There would be a way to add and break the parent-child links after the fact, although maybe that would be reserved for the moderators so they could correct mistakes or detach sub-threads that outgrow their parent.