Question
· Feb 7, 2017

[Suggestion] Flatten comments after first level

(Note: I thought I had already posted this, but I think it was the other day when you were having hosting issues. Sorry if it is a duplicate)

 

Lots of comments really screws up the layout.

Discussion (18)1
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Threading is a god send in very populated forums. You could used to flat discussions if there are no many participants, but once more people got involved, and more topics got added to the fule, the harder to navigate in a flat thread. 

Threading might be not that deep (i.e. a couple of "em" to the right), but in either form they better to keep threading.

[Lack of threading is driving me crazy in all modern messengers with groups enabled, like Slack, Skype, Telegram. Have you ever tried to not get lost in very popular chat room in Telegram or Slack once there are more than 500 members joined?]

I could probably be convinced either way, however at some point you have to wonder, if a post has so many disparate threads/conversations, is the topic too vague?  Perhaps a new post is warranted.

I think of both extremes.  Reddit is 100% threaded and gets very out of hand, but StackOverflow is only minimally threaded (each answer has comments).  I think it works well there, but I suppose these forums fall somewhere in between.  It's not a simple question/answer site, but a place for discussions as well.  I grew up on dial up BBSs and later phpBB though, and non-threaded conversations were just a way of life that I never noticed a problem with.

As Evgeny said, perhaps we just wait for it to be a problem, then try to come up with a creative solution.

 

edit: for what it's worth, many modern forums have the option of "Flat, Threaded or Hybrid" views.  Also, here's an interesting take on the subject.