Tags and comments

? Offline

Here's someone talking about how expandable comments reduce usability compared to smaller always-listed comments:

"When the big site redesign happened the useability of the site went into the crapper. I don't waste my time expanding comments under answers. Many good things are lost when embedded under answers and not seen. Who wants to click to expand comments? Not me. I think the problem is directly linked to this clunky comments and answers system. It non-standard and I don't like it."

Chanon Sajjamanochai

I too think a comment (reply under reply) feature would be extremely beneficial. It doesn't have to be fully threaded, just 1 level under a top level reply is enough.

This would make NodeBB even more perfect as a blog commenting system too as blog commenting systems such as DISQUS have this.

a_5mith

If you start threading one level, then it needs to go another level when that quote or reply receives another reply or a quote. The one thing I despise about reddit is the layout of the comments and how they just get levelled down, until eventually it stops giving you the replies and tells you to open another page to view them.

List view, all the same. Nice and simple. Winner.

? Offline

@a_5mith To be fair, reddit has infinite layers whereas all StackExchange/Askbot/Q2A/etc sites have one layer.

From my (admittedly narrow) experience, the comments rarely number more than five or so.

julian

@Kamal-Patel They sure do here

? Offline

@julian I didn't know those still existed in 2014

art

If not threaded comments, maybe a control next to the @name_of_person_replied_to that will zoom you up to the post that was being replied to.

Another idea is to have an alternate view. A control that when you click on it, rearranges everything as nested comments.

art

Actually discourse has a very good implementation of threaded comments. Best of both worlds approach that satisfies everybody.

Richa Singh

@zenkamal this is true!

agd1

This thread is applicable to this discussion I believe. Perhaps NodeBB can leapfrog what's currently out there by a happy medium between nested comments and forked conversations. I dunno... it seems like we could allow 1 level of comments on a post, but not 2 (so no comment on a comment, only comment on a post). But --- we could build up forking functionality to allow forking of posts.

So if someone really did want to comment on a comment, they could fork that and keep going. After all, confusion and lack of context is the complaint against reddit-like discussion isn't it? If we allowed one level of comments only, and then required forking after that, it might be the happy medium. Context would theoretically always be there.