Suggestion: collapsible hierarchical comments on posts.

[Tcll]

This actually started (in a convo with Dani) as a simple idea of just upvoting comments made to posts, buuut I quickly got ideas for turning comments into a sort-of Reddit-style thread system, where comments could be collapsed so the original general idea of the forum thread could be viewed.

I'd also suggested a user display setting to collapse comment threads by default, but Dani brought up a conflicting idea that if someone made a comment saying some post was wrong or something, users who collapse comments by default wouldn't see it.

personally, while this is valid, the responsibility is on the user to expand the comments on the post
but to add, a following post explaining a mistake or such should be made regardless <_<
I'm sure people wouldn't do that, but I don't believe that should be a reason of detrament for such an idea
I mean heck, StackExchange has collapsed comments, and I haven't seen many complaints there

but anyways, I just wanted to suggest for some better functionality for this place :)

[Dani]

Just want to chime in ... We initially discussed the idea of a multi-threaded system where you could comment on comments of comments, etc. However, doing so would take a massive restructuring of our platform and I'm not so sure that it would result in immediate benefits that were worthy of the time it took. Basically deciding to go that route would require some type of proof of concept that there would be a return on my time investment.

In terms of having comments hidden by default, it wouldn't be a massive coding effort, but I'm not really sure I understand the benefits. Not enough people comment on posts to make discussions hard to read. I think that I can see the idea of comments posted by newbies or "untrustworthy" members being hidden by default, but I'm not so sure I see strong benefits to make all comments hidden by default.

Thoughts??

[Reverend Jim]

I don't see the benefit of collapsible comments, but while we are on the subject of comments, could we display comments in chronological order? When I comment on a post that already has a comment I think my comment should go at the end of the list of comments, not at the beginning. Especially if my comment is referring to an already posted comment.

[Dani]

When I comment on a post that already has a comment I think my comment should go at the end of the list of comments, not at the beginning. Especially if my comment is referring to an already posted comment.

That makes sense. I'll look some more into it, and by that I mean see what our competition is doing (Stack Overflow, Reddit, etc.). As you know, right now we display comments in reverse chronological order (newest first). I understand your reasoning for them being in reverse order, but for the sake of having a user-friendly user interface for people new to the site, I'd like to stick with standards of what the other big sites are doing.

Our reason for doing it in reverse chronological order was the idea that if there were lots and lots of comments on a post, the most recent ones (and perhaps most relevant) would be shown first, while older ones would eventually fall off the page and require a 'See More' link to load them.

[Reverend Jim]

That makes sense where there are lots and lots of comments although I don't recall ever having seen a post with that many.

[Dani]

Post comments are now sorted oldest to newest.