On forum tree threading

[Bruno Medeiros via Digitalmars-d]

On 24/03/2016 15:14, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, March 24, 2016 14:01:04 Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 09:16:51 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> Note the lack of tree threading
>>
>> That's a feature. Tree threading is one of the worst things I've
>> ever seen and I wish it would die completely.
>>
>> Thankfully, we can turn it off here, but it still kinda ruins
>> things because it isolates replies, so the same thing tends to be
>> said over and over again.
>
> LOL. I would _hate_ to lose tree-threading. I wouldn't read the newsgroup
> any other way. I don't know how anyone keeps tracks of conversations in a
> sane manner without it. But I'm certainly not against having alternatives in
> the forum so that users can choose which way works best for them. And folks
> using a newsgroup reader or an e-mail client to view the newsgroup have the
> same choice.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis
>

For me, the jury is still out. Originally I was a big fan of tree 
threading (together with being able to manually manage read/unread 
status of posts, like you do in Thunderbird) . I agree that following 
large conversations without it can become very tricky.

But I also agree it makes it harder to follow the chronological order, 
and somethings things are mentioned in one post that were already 
mentioned "elsewhere" in the tree, where "elsewhere" is a more 
complicated relation because there is no linearity.

That said, I think modern forum software like Discourse strike a good 
balance with linear threads. One key feature being the ability to spawn 
off a new thread from an existing one. This actually fixes two issues at 
once. One is it actually makes general thread size smaller, making it 
easier to follow a whole thread linearly. Second it features built-in 
support to creating an new topic that spawns from a previous discussion. 
In NNTP you can rename the title, but it's a bit of hack, different 
clients handle it differently, etc.


-- 
Bruno Medeiros
https://twitter.com/brunodomedeiros