Re:
I got a message from [url=http://willfe.com]William Ferrell[/url], with a feature request for thtreaded replies. I am not particularly keen on it, but would like to discuss, if this should be a good feature for Dinette to have? Will's message copied from the blog follows.
Just following up on my Twitter comment a bit. This app looks very good, and I love how fast the demo is. This is clean, compact, and lightweight.
When I mentioned threading, its absence isn’t a complaint, but a feature request (and I’m tempted to just plug it in myself via Treebeard, which includes a sample threaded forum app anyway).
You mentioned that your favorite bulletin apps don’t support threading, but vBulletin actually does. Unfortunately, vBulletin handles threading in exactly the wrong way.
In “linear” mode, it does what it always did before threading was introduced — it just lists every post in chronological order, oldest to newest, and splits the “thread” into multiple pages once there’s more than 15 or so posts. Like I mentioned in my Twitter reply, popular threads on busy forums can easily grow to over one thousand pages. Any way you slice that, it’s simply unusable like this. You simply can’t follow the discussion unless you’ve got a week or two to devote to clicking through (and reading) one thousand pages of posts.
In “hybrid” and “threaded” modes, it does show a threaded view of the posts in the thread (i.e. you can actually spot when someone replies to someone else versus just posting a new post in the thread) and it’s possible to see the “shape” of the conversation. Hybrid mode continues listing all posts chronologically beneath the thread list, while “threaded” mode just shows one post at a time.
Hybrid mode is useless on large threads — it’s just linear mode with a widget that contains a list of all posts (tens of thousands on the example monster thread I mentioned). Threaded mode is worse-than-useless — it forces you to deal with every message individually instead of being able to view a slice of the conversation in context.
There’s two sites I can think of off the top my head that have very different forum systems and that handle threading much better. They’re not perfect, but they do provide a good example of how it should work. One is Slashdot, which has a sickeningly over-complicated Javascript-based monstrosity of a threading system, and the other is Reddit, which goes the other direction with a lightweight, spartan system. I point to Slashdot as a good example in spite of its complex layout because it’s effective at what it does. Reddit is a closer idea of what I picture django-forum supporting.
They both let you do something very useful in a discussion — you can quickly filter away (hide) the stuff you don’t care about. When “what you care about” changes, you can quickly rearrange the display (or navigate to another part of the thread, if you’re not using Javascript) to refocus your attention on another conversation. Note that both sites take moderation into consideration, too, so on a busy site with lots of chatter (and decent moderation in place), the junk gets filtered away automatically and you have to deliberately ask to see what gets hidden.
The one thing vBulletin does demonstrate successfully is that you can add a threading mechanism to an existing forum without screwing up the “old” way — the good news is threading can be supported behind-the-scenes and an “old school” list-posts-chronologically board can still be plopped in place quickly (just hide the threading options and act like threading’s not there). For people who are used to things working that way and who won’t consider switching, they can still have what they’re used to. For folks who don’t want to trudge through dozens of pages to look for replies to a post they’re interested in, full threading can be enabled to keep them happy too.
Just my two cents, but hopefully this makes a bit more sense than just a simple “looks neat, but I wish it had threads” comment
