Forum discussion threads - what to do when you reach a reply limit

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Permalink Reply by Bud Poll on September 26, 2012 at 7:50am

Hi Diane and thanks,

There is another aspect of the reply sequence to consider.  Often on long threads there can be multiple replies to different comments, thus a later reply can end up buried somewhere within the original thread.  Someone joining the thread at a later date is faced with a real chronology problem.  I have had to copy and paste a thread piece by piece to a word doc to sort out the different conversations.  I guess in most cases the reality is, few will read an extremely long thread anyway :), we live is such an abbreviated world.

Bud

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Permalink Reply by Diane Chojnowski on September 26, 2012 at 11:04am

Bud, I know what you mean. I participate in another forum with a lot of good material on social communities and I really need to make sure that I follow the discussions I'm interested in so that I don't miss anything - especially if it's a popular topic. :)

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Permalink Reply by Robert Riversong on September 27, 2012 at 12:29pm

Changing the order to chronological rather than threaded would make the "conversation" truly impossible to follow as there would be no way to determine which post was a reply to another.

A threaded order is the easiest to follow, and limiting the number of replies keeps the text from getting squeezed too tightly into a narrow box on the right. Going upthread to find the last reply button, as Diane suggests, works just fine.

I think the system is about as good as it can be just as it is.

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Permalink Reply by Diane Chojnowski on September 27, 2012 at 12:36pm

Thank you Robert. We considered the option of the chronological ordering but felt that the threading feature is very useful and only presents a problem when there are lots of responses.

The system has some limitations but Bud's suggestion on how to deal with the thread limit is a good work around.

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