Refs: Introducing nested replies - Announcements - Discourse Meta
Is this something Admins might consider enabling?
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I note that the announcement states that there’s no way to convert an existing category to nested mode. I’m not sure how useful the feature will be with that limitation - we don’t create new categories very often, and I don’t think we should just close down existing categories so that we can start new versions with nesting enabled.
Would it not be better to wait until that limitation is removed?
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You misread the quote:
When nesting is enabled for a category, pre-existing topics stay in flat mode. Each topic can individually toggled from the admin wrench, but there is currently no way to convert an existing category to nested mode.
What can’t happen is automatically move all topics in a category to nested mode, making existing topics nested and making new topics in a category nested by default is possible.
However, AFAICT this would be forcibly enabled for all users reading a topic without a per-user opt out? Ideally it would be a quick toggle, because I strongly suspect that many conversations are going to be easier to keep up with in full in linear mode. But the devs are apparently of a completely different opinion :-/
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Oh, but this is reason enough to maybe wait a bit more:
That’s not what the quoted text says. It specifically refers to not being able to convert an existing category to nested mode. That doesn’t seem to be consistent with the previous sentence that says you can enable nesting for a category with pre-existing topics. It’s probably something we should check before making any decisions.
Yes, this also bothers me - I’d argued in the other thread that nested view should be a user choice, and I’m hoping that the opinions expressed in that other thread will be taken into account before doing anything. My comment here was purely on the basis of “if we decide to do this, maybe we should wait until it can be applied to existing categories?”
Not only a reason to wait, but also (I’d say) a reason to make sure we don’t do anything that can’t be reverted if people end up not liking it. Ideally, I’d say we should set up a test instance first, but I suspect that would be of limited use, as nobody’s going to have actual discussions in a test instance 
No, they are just using sloppy language, it’s clear what they mean if you read the later posts about this:
- you can enable it for any category. This means all newly created posts in that topic are in nested mode.
- admins can convert existing topics into nested mode.
- It is not possible to convert all historic topics in a category into nested mode
The core reason behind there not being the ability to mass convert historic posts and give each user a choice is because the devs believe that there is a fundamental difference in how people interact with these different topic interfaces that make the coexistence of these in the same thread impossible. This isn’t something they can’t implement, this is something they don’t want to allow. IMO they are being a bit pretentious (not the right word) here, they should just give admins the ability to configure this however they want.
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For those who have not seen it yet, another member of discuss.python.org worked on a Discourse mod (fork, plugin?) to enable exactly this:
Also for those who might not know it, Discourse’s own email notifications are nested, there is also a “mailing list mode”.
As far as I understand, some members of discuss.python.org interact only via the emails, which are nested. So we already have the case where different members interact with a fundamentally different interface (nested vs. linear but also other differences). I know because I recall cases where some slight miscommunications turned out to be caused by this difference. Typically it was cases of mild annoyances caused by confusion about which message was a reply to which message: it is not always obvious in the linear interface while it is unambiguous in the nested interface. But all in all, those cases seem to be quite rare. So it seems to me like generalizing the possibility of letting each user choose between two display modes, linear or nested, could work.
Honestly, it always feels a bit odd to me that on Discourse forums like discuss.python.org we are given the choice between replying to the thread (roughly: append a new message to the end of the discussions thread) or replying to a specific message (roughly: start a new nested discussion thread), but once the message is posted the main web interface gives barely any clue about which one is which. So now, I tend to always reply to the thread and never to a specific message in the thread.
Personally, I do not know which of linear or nested is a better choice for our use cases. But Discourse seems to always have been somewhere in between and it seems very odd. I do not understand the rationale.
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Personally, I do not know which of linear or nested is a better choice for our use cases.
I came to this forum as a refugee from Python mailing lists which were being closed down at the time. Having previously interacted with the mailing lists in a threading-capable MUA, I was pleased to see that Discourse’s “mailing list mode” retained that functionality (even with its various other shortcomings it was still preferable over having to talk to people in a web browser).
My MUA, like many, lets me easily toggle between a tree-like thread view or ordering by arbitrary criteria (subject, author, time sent, time received, and so on). While I primarily read DPO and other mailing lists in a threaded view, I do sometimes have reason to switch to a linear chronological view either by topic or across the whole forum (some discussions e.g. PEP-oriented ones have a tendency to spawn references across multiple topics, and it helps to see them show up together in order).
At least for me, being able to switch between different representations of a discussion on the fly is very helpful, so the arguments for making it a user-specific preference are reasonable to me. Of course, I already get that feature by not using the WebUI, so what that interface can or can’t do isn’t as much of a concern in my case.
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I agree. Unfortunately the Discourse developers seem to have explicitly rejected that, since a post in the linked thread says:
We don’t want this to be a user’s decision or preference. It’s up to the administers to decide how their site should function.
This perspective is quite depressing to me, especially if it indicates a more general mindset among the Discourse devs, because I kind of think the exact opposite. Different users should be able to choose their own favorite way of displaying and interacting with the forum.
If that’s the case, then I’m -1 on having nested replies on the Python forums. That’s a shame, because clearly some people would prefer them, but IMO we should stick with the status quo unless there’s a clear and significant majority of people who would benefit from the change, and there’s no sign of that.
Yeah I have to agree. If I could switch between views at will, I would definitely try threaded view, but I wouldn’t want to enforce that on everyone else.