@RevdKathy
So are you for or against my proposed branched comments view?

Or maybe people just long for mailing lists?

/goes into hiding after this cheeky troll :P

My question is - will this thread reach the appropriate people that are in charge of the site's web design?

There's really just one, and he's aware of the issue.

For myself, I hate threaded view. But my understanding is that where it is applied, in most cases it's an option you can choose or not. I would turn it off - though having it it would make discussions harder to follow as people would make less use of the quote function.

But this board is (strangely!) not all about me and what I like. If a decent number of people would like this option enabled, then I would support them being offered that option. On previous boards I've been at where it's enabled, it's been used by less than 1% of the readers. My point was that the needs here might be rather different from those of a chat type board.

wait... I must be missing something,, I thought the whole point was that if we had it enabled people would make *more* use of the quote function... since thats what the thread is built from???

I've yet to hear an explanation for how threaded posts on a pull system like a forum would work. It works great for email because my email client is designed to push new, unread messages at me.

However, on a forum I get one notification of a reply and then - at some later point - use newsub.php to read through, from my last read point, new posts in threads of interest.

How would I not end up reading old posts (and without checking the dates, not be sure about whether or not they were old) or missing posts?

I don't understand that comment Jaffa. I've seen it work on numerous forums. IMDB is one.

Sorry, I'm not asking if it does work; I'm asking how it works. On IMDb how do you avoid re-reading old posts or missing posts when trying to do a daily catch-up?

The online fora I've used which had threaded comments I always ended up having to either sort by date or re-read large swathes of it again.

Or, perhaps, I've not explained the problem well. Consider the following post tree:

As of Monday, you've read the whole thread. And then there's three posts:

In our current layout, with chronological layout and good quoting, you'd see posts J, K and L at the end of the paged list of posts; since there's a link which takes me straight to post 'J' (the first unread), it's then trivial to start reading to the end of the thread and be fully caught up.

@Jaffa

Well.. in the *current* system, there is a "Go to first unread" button that sits next to the thread title. It's a small black box that will take you directly to the last post you read.

I am not sure if similar could be implemented in "tree" or "list" view.. or whatever the mailing list one is called.

Subscriptions would also send you emails about people responding to threads. The only time subscriptions don't work is new posts.. but once you've read one and decided you're interested in following it you can just subscribe to it.

ETA: I just realized this probably only exists in the old Dark Theme.. I have no idea if it was implemented in the new orange one..