21 thoughts on “Threaded comments”

1. I love threaded comments, because it enables us to respond to a particular post without interrupting the general flow.

   At the same time, your comment flow is pretty linear, skipping from argument to argument without a lot of diversion (compared to many others).

   I’d give it a go. If it encourages chaos, I guess you can disable it – as it seems The Poor Man has, even though I thought it was an exemplary use of the form.

2. I’m the opposite of David – I hate them. I find them unweildy without really adding much value. So I vote no, for what it’s worth.

3. I think it’s a good idea, particularly because each of your posts may cover several topics, each of which needs a discussion thread.

   Here’s the opinion of someone who has thought a lot about discussion forums. (although I’m not sure what his opinion of threading would be. You probably know enough about your public to know how his points apply to your context)

4. I’m afraid I have to agree with tim. If you had fifty posts in a thread after a post being up an hour, it might be useful, but posting here is low and slow enough that it’d be annoying, or useless at best.

5. John, that is by far the worst idea you’ve ever had. Please, please don’t do it!

6. No.

7. Obviously, I don’t know your readers, but what I’ve found works best for threaded comments is a combination of very casual readers, who may read whatever comments are there at the time they read a post, or may not bother, and a fairly small number of stalkers. Provide a comment RSS feed, so the stalkers don’t have the problem of having to keep scrolling up and down thread to keep track of what’s new, and they’re happy, and casual readers are happy because that one time that someone twenty comments up says something they want to respond to, they don’t have to start out “Three days ago, twenty comments up, John said ‘I think…'”

   Of course, for all I know I’d be pulling a couple hundred comments per post if I didn’t annoy people with my confusing threaded comments, but then I have the not-widely-shared opinion that if someone takes the time to comment, you should respond if their comment is at all open to response, so I don’t want that many more, and I love threading since it lets me be slow and still go back five comments and clearly respond directly to someone. YMMV.

8. Hate them. I don’t find the discussions here hard to follow at all. If someone’s referring to something said 10 comments up, it’s really not hard to cat and paste the relevant passage.

9. Threaded comments are prolly not absolutely needed at this level of commenting, but they can still be useful. I personally would prefer them, although they do seem to gather alot of negative reaction, I think mostly ’cause ppl are generally not as attuned to tree structures as they are to linear structures.

10. My vote is no. I like browsing comments, even the bad ones, and threads in my experience make it a lot harder.

11. As a keen daily reader but not a contributor (damn that Economics 102.5 – never got the hang!), I would say “no thanks”. I find that, with the level of commentary that you attract, the current system is simpler to navigate and earlier posts easy to retrieve if necessary. However, being a loving moggy-owner, I am most disconcerted at the notion of “cat and paste”!

12. Sorry Phil, no offence intended. Obviously I meant cat and pasta, a specialty of my local trattoria.

13. Not in favour. I think that comments work effectively as they are in their simple, unadulterated form. Following a diversity of threads is something that the interested reader can – and, ideally, should – do for him or herself.

14. had a look, and sorry to say i find them horrible! what’s wrong with the current system?

15. The biggest improvement would be to replace the silly little comment window which opens and which is not resizable. So if you click on a link in a comment you only get a small window on the opened site, with no navigation buttons, and there is no way to get back to the comments without closing the window, re-clicking on comments and then scrolling down to where you were.

    I new to blog-reading and I am surprised that this anomaly with blogging software hasn’t been fixed.

16. Ron, don’t click on the comment link, but on the permalink link (the posting time, in this case) on its immediate left.

17. Ron: If you right-click and select “open in new window,” you can get a new window with all the features for the link you click on. But I do agree that the comment window should be resizeable.

    I vote no on threaded comments. They’re too hard to follow, and too hard to find new posts in.

18. Thank you James & Stentor for that advice. It makes reading a lot more comfortable.

19. Mercy no.

    Threaded comments are designed to deal with scale but in reality they solve nothing.

    Compare Slashdot to Metafilter.

20. I work from the “recent comments list” on the left to pick up new comments. The present system would be easier for people who check about once a day.

21. Of course the comments list is on the right. I think I’ll go back to bed!

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