The threads are messy without nesting

It appears that when you reply to somebody, the reply just gets inserted into the flat list of posts chronologically with a tag/badge of the person the reply is to. This makes the thread almost impossible to follow. Is it possible to make replies nest under the entry that they are in response to so that all responses to an original post are nested together?

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Firstly, welcome to the forums! I was just watching one of your laser videos today so it’s super cool that you’re here.

As far as posts threading together they do… When you click into a post you read it chronologically and then at the bottom there’s a reply field. Are you seeing something different?

Hi Eric,
When I go into a thread, everything seems to be flat (no indentations) and chronological. I can only tell something is a reply to someone because (I think) it shows the badge of the original post. I tried to illustrate that in a screenshot below, however, I can’t tell if the screenshot actually pasted or not, it just shows a link.

Jim

Ok, now i see it did put in the pic

Basically what I’m talking about is similar to how Facebook threads look (and I really hate to use FB as an example of a good format, but in this case it is :-)). They indent every reply right after the post that the reply is too, and then replies to replies get further indented so that the entire thread is bundled together neatly. It is much easier to read and follow than just mixing all replies together at the same level and in chronological order.

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@jjneeb i know what you’re talking about and agree it would be easier to follow along. @Eric is there any provision for that in the forum settings you can access?
Regardless, awesome forum and I’m happy to be a part of it!

Can you send me a screenshot of what you’re seeing? What you’re describing that you want is exactly how the forum works… but from what you’re saying it sounds like you’re seeing something very different…

Are you seeing something different than this?

Hi Eric,

First, I really like how this thing views videos right in the post. That was helpful what you sent, and I also just posted a YouTube video for a new monitor mount, and it plays right in the thread w/o having to jump out into YouTube. Pretty cool.

Anyway, back to the topic. Yes, what you are showing is exactly what I am seeing. I think my description of the issue was not very clear. So I think a better way to describe it is that any reply, is a posted at the same level. So if I reply to the main thread, then three other people reply to the main thread, and then others reply to my original reply, they will all show up at the top level as replies and you can’t distinguish replies from replies to replies since there is no visual to link them together.

Below I pasted a screenshot of the AVID FB User’s Group. You can see how all replies to a reply are nested within the area below the reply. Hitting the “reply” button will associate the reply with the location that it is in the thread. This way replies to replies are very easily distinguished from each other as well as replies to the main original post itself.

Does that explain it better?
thanks,
Jim

I didn’t find a site-wide option to display messages as threads, but there is a “Reply” drop-down in the bottom left corner of each message where you can see a more thread-like structure.

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Yes, perfectly! Now I get what you’re after.

One of the reasons we went with this forum software is that it’s NOT like Facebook/Reddit. Nested replies on FB in my opinion aren’t great… Partly because FB automatically collapses them as it sees fit, but also because it splinters a topic/conversation. Reddit is famous for this…

Here it’s all flat threading, and the reason behind that is to promote conversation in a more logical order.

There are ways of adding better context to a replay though, because I do get it… You might want to address the second post in a 30 post long conversation. There are two ways to do that:

1: Quote reply. When you’re reading a message and you want to have it as part of your reply (as I did here) all you have to do is click and drag on any text to quote it.

2: You can split a topic into a new thread whenever you want. Say someone is talking about the recipe of a pie they baked, but in the picture they showed you have questions about their oven they used… This probably warrants a new thread you can actually have a reply be a new thread: How to "reply as topic"? - support - Discourse Meta

This feature is more buried than I’d like it to be, so it probably warrants a forum sticky.

The TLDR here is that we can’t do indented replies, and that’s very intentionally designed into the forum software.

I just noticed that reply button on the left that you circled (I missed that yesterday). That helps. Too bad they don’t have a button to switch between nested and flat on the whole thread. This button only deals with one reply at a time, and still leaves a copy down below.

As you said, there is no perfect solution because with the nesting then things aren’t in chronological order and its hard to see what is “new”.

I just noticed that there are bubbles up top right on the user’s badge that have notifications of replies and posts (similar to FB) so that will be helpful to find fresh replies I think.

Yeah, I wish there was a way you could view it the way you want, but the devs of Discourse are pretty set on the “flat view” (I went down the rabbit hole of reading a whole post about it!)

Glad you found some shortcuts that are helpful.