Allow nested replies in Q&A Threads

arn

Well-known member
Context:

The Q&A thread naturally lends itself to "post comments". Now, I never thought threaded conversations really worked well in the traditional forum setting -- I recall vBulletin's attempts at it. But, when you are talking about a Q&A where the A's are pieces of votable content itself. There is naturally going to be discussions around the A's.

The problem with the flat structure is what happens when someone replies to an Answer? That answer's reply gets its own Vote button, which doesn't make much sense. And what happens when people sort by Vote? These strange replies will be floating around with no context.

Since we're already being a little loose with post order anyway in these Q&A threads -- IMO, the best solution would be when someone replies to an Answer by hitting Reply or Quote on that Answer itself, that reply gets nested under the Answer, and not in the thread somewhere.

I'd like to suggest nested replies for Q&A threads. A single level of nesting would be sufficient with some way to "expand more" that hides excess replies after N replies.

This is how the other major Q&A forums works: StackOverflow, Quora.

Answers get their own independent thread of replies.
Example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13316966/css-checkboxes-radio-buttons-when-input-is-inside-label

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Last edited:
Upvote 144
The problem with that is when someone replies asa nested comment it is not necessary to quote what they are replying to. So if you then opt view as "flat" there will be orphan replies floating around with no quote of what the are actually replying to.

Or does the post being commented on turn into a quote in the reply?
That's a good question. I guess it would have to quote it in full for the proper context which might then have issues with formatting, database hits, page speed etc. One can just imagine a long post being quoted in full being a problem, especially if there are lots of them in a thread when users are having at it in the typical dispute.
 
We have a live demo of this and it works nicely.

 
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