Will Xenforo ever adopt threaded comment structures (like Reddit)?

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qazwsxedcrfv1234

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I know that Xenforo comments have a flat structure, but is there any chance that the forum software will come to adopt a threaded structure (like Reddit)?

Speaking of flat / threaded comments, which do you prefer? Is there a way to have both types of comments be shown for users?

I know that there might be some bias towards flat (as Xenforo's userbase is accustomed to flat comments), but it would still be nice to know as to which you prefer and why.
 
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Digital Doctor said:
vBulletin 2 did that I believe.
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So did vB 3 and Invision and MyBB back in the mists of time.

The problem with switching back and forth is that it fundamentally doesn't work, or at least only works if you're switching from nested to flat - the other direction doesn't.

The reason is that in a flat thread, the reply is always to the end of the thread, never to any of the leaf nodes, so switching from flat to nested means you inevitably have one big chain of reply-to-reply-to-reply that dwarfs everything else.

Or you do what Discourse originally tried to do, which was have its cake and eat it, and inevitably led to people thinking they were replying to one post but the software logged it as replying to someone else's. (It's been a while, maybe they fixed this since.)
 
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Khmer Rouge said:
Well, let me expand since you are paying me. lmao
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That's fair

Lu5tgUP.gif
 
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FTL said:
Are you sure you don't mean 1995 or later, perhaps? Back in 1990 the web had only just been invented and there were no commercial services generally available.
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I think it is easy to forget that discussion forums started back in the Arpanet days. I was using it in 1970. Of course, technically, we were using terminals and connecting to a mainframe.

Our current forum has threads from 2002.
 
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Tom McIntyre said:
I think it is easy to forget that discussion forums started back in the Arpanet days. I was using it in 1970. Of course, technically, we were using terminals and connecting to a mainframe.

Our current forum has threads from 2002.
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Sure, but forums in this current web based format have only been around since the late 90s, hence my question. There's no way they would have existed back in 1990. The terminals you describe sound more like a form of one to one private messaging.
 
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FTL said:
Sure, but forums in this current web based format have only been around since the late 90s, hence my question. There's no way they would have existed back in 1990. The terminals you describe sound more like a form of one to one private messaging.
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No so. :-)

Lookup the Usenet, Planet-Forum in the early 70s, late 70's BBS systems that kept evolving all the way up through the late 1990s, plus systems like CompuServe (who also invented the GIF format), with similar layouts to forums today. Prodigy was graphic not text based service, and it had a rich bbs system. They grew to nearly 500K members. These services and many more had both linear and threaded formats. Many of these also had file sharing built into the discussions.

We used to have discussions on Usenet with thousands of participants all over the world, and that would just be one subject under one topic. On most days there were tens of thousands of discussions across hundreds of groups. FWIW, the term "spam" came from the Usenet who borrowed it from a Monty Python skit.
 
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MySiteGuy said:
Lookup the Usenet, Planet-Forum in the early 70s, late 70's BBS systems that kept evolving all the way up through the late 1990s, plus systems like CompuServe
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As a former Compuserve sysop, I resemble that comment. 😁

Web-based forums date back to the 1990s (wwwboard) and yep, Usenet was around a lot longer. In the mid to late 1980s, I had seen Usenet mentioned on bulletin boards but back then, had no clue as to how I could ever find it on my own. But then again, online access was timed, and I had no "connections" to a university or corporation that belonged to the Internet (decades before it became almost like a public utility as it is today).
 
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