I have turned on a feature called “Nested Replies.”
We will use this for one week before deciding to keep it or not since new interfaces take time to get used to.
I sort of like it already. Give feedback here… or “Reply” to test it out.
Thanks. I usually don’t like a nested view, but it will be goo to try it out.
If you hit reply, you will get the nested view like this.
Right right.
I think it is a useful change
We will try to use it for a week. I actually requested “discourse” to allow for a personal setting, but we will see what happens. I think eventually it will come. It is still experimental.
I go through the pains of upgrading, so I saw this feature and enabled it for fun. Our volume and user base is small enough and we have khanti as well.
We have had many experimental features on our server before they were made standard.. for instance emojis.
Dear Venerable Sit, it is a bit too confusing to me to look at the replies, and I don’t know where to reply to when in a long topic, I personally wouldn’t recommend the change. It kind of gives me a small psychological distress of some sort.
We will try for one week. If it is not in agreement, we will roll back the feature.
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I agree with this. It makes me dizzy.
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Let it ride for one week. I remember when I went to gmail and there was no way to turn threaded emails off. now it makes more sense to me.
Not a fan of this but let’s give it a whirl.
Oh good now it is like Reddit. Much better. Instead of reading every reply if one just wants to reply to a person, just reply on that comment. This encourages participation, lessen the risk of people accusing each other of not reading the whole thing before replying. Especially on topics with 100+ replies.
Yes, it is pretty good, but i don’t like how it puts me at the top each time I read the topic. but overall, it is good. We can know who is replying to who. However, the response is not going well so far. It would be good if more of our seasoned members commented.
I think if we vote on it later, we can use the level points to count a a vote. Level 1 gets one vote, level 2 gets 2 votes, etc.
I am leaning against it now. looks like a confused email thread.
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It is back to the old method now.
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This is the exact problem with the nesting. It’s like Reddit, which is one of the worst places for thoughtful discussions.
I can see cases, like a Q&A category where definitive answers are possible, where it could be useful. But not for discussions.
Also, I would guess that many users don’t understand the difference between the two reply buttons:
(image is less than 10kb)
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In the end, the Discourse software developers (who make this discussion group software) do not use nested replies.
I had selected the default to show the “top” of the discussion. I think that was half of the issue. It would have been better to use a different setting, but that was the default.
You can see the Discourse discussion below, and notice that they have the older non-nested method for their group or even their discussion on this topic. I think we can turn it on per topic, but I will look into that. We are a small group and we have added many “plugins” that are very new, like one-click sign-in, emojis, etc. It is good. We tried it; most people didn’t like it, it is reversible, and now we know.
That’s a good point.
Now Discourse is being used in so many different ways by so many different groups that lots of the new features don’t make much sense for a pure discussion forum like this one.
Nested replies are easier for super busy communities with lots of replies and comments. Like in Sutta Central forum, once the topic goes to 100+, 200+ replies, I am not motivated to read them even if the topic is very interesting as I cannot bring myself to read all the comments. But with nested replies, I can just read the top few comments, and go explore down the line if I find that interesting, and thus filter out what’s not interesting to me.
Perhaps when this forum becomes much more popular and active it would make sense to use it or can it be set that topics with 100+ replies turn into nested replies?
We have AI summaries and AI proofreading which help when there are long threads “one does not feel like reading”. SC wouldn’t dare bring AI into their forum. We try new features at CT, most of them don’t go global posts with the exception of this one.
We started this group on $6 per month and now it costs $16 which is still cheaper than the generic rental subdomain that was originally done at discoursehostingDOTnet (which is now no longer existing on that name). Self Hosting on DigitalOcean is not like starting a WordPress website. Work goes on behind the scenes to keep things up to date. I run the backups in remote terminals which usually requires a “rebuild” of the software. Quite often, the rebuild for updates cause the server to crash. When I cannot fix it, I have a person with server login credentials to answer my SOS messages.
However, this is what we do. I think you like most of the other goodies we add. Actually, and recently, Discourse has been including a lot of experimental or grossly expensive features into the standard build. Emojis, who is online, message chat and one-click login were often “paywalled” for those who paid huge server fees (usually corporations who supported Discourse), but they themselves tell you how to install these features yourself or how to host the whole Discourse server for $5 per month on their official website. These methods were not for the technically weak though. We did those features early on, when it required adding a plugin to a config file and rebuilding the software. Now it is standard and other Discourse groups have these features.
This nested replies feature was not an experimental plugin… but an included new feature.
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