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 thereās no way to convert an existing category to nested mode. Iām not sure how useful the feature will be with that limitation - we donāt create new categories very often, and I donāt 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 canāt 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:
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Thatās not what the quoted text says. It specifically refers to not being able to convert an existing category to nested mode. That doesnāt seem to be consistent with the previous sentence that says you can enable nesting for a category with pre-existing topics. Itās probably something we should check before making any decisions.
Yes, this also bothers me - Iād argued in the other thread that nested view should be a user choice, and Iām 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 āif we decide to do this, maybe we should wait until it can be applied to existing categories?ā
Not only a reason to wait, but also (Iād say) a reason to make sure we donāt do anything that canāt be reverted if people end up not liking it. Ideally, Iād say we should set up a test instance first, but I suspect that would be of limited use, as nobodyās going to have actual discussions in a test instance 
No, they are just using sloppy language, itās 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 isnāt something they canāt implement, this is something they donāt 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, Discourseās own email notifications are nested, there is also a āmailing list modeā.
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 Discourseās āmailing list modeā 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 canāt do isnāt 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 donāt want this to be a userās decision or preference. Itās 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 thatās the case, then Iām -1 on having nested replies on the Python forums. Thatās a shame, because clearly some people would prefer them, but IMO we should stick with the status quo unless thereās a clear and significant majority of people who would benefit from the change, and thereās 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 wouldnāt want to enforce that on everyone else.
@jonathandekhtiar and I tried this during the EuroPython sprint just now and itās indeed unacceptable as a default view. You can see it in action in this topic.
The nesting is a welcome visual improvement, however it seems to us it should be selectable by the viewer, not the topic author. When it is forced on all readers, we expect people will complain. Especially that the nested viewās got a few non-trivial issues that donāt make it a clear improvement.
We cannot enable that for everyone in the current state.
A summary of issues we found
Getting to the latest reply is not obvious
This scrollbar on the right is gone with nested replies:
This makes it hard to tell if youāve read everything.
Sorting of the nested replies is kind of surprising
Regardless of whether āoldā, ānewā, or ātopā is chosen, every tester at the sprint was confused. Itās probably obvious to Reddit users, but itās a big departure from the previous obvious ātime goes downā sorting.
Like, why in the screenshot beloww is @Quercusā reply above mine? Mine was posted sooner! Itās no longer sorted by āoldā, right?
Deeper replies are flattened and hidden by default (?)
Thereās a default 3-level limit for replies. In the screenshot below @hugovk and I replied to @Quercus, but those replies got flattened and now they appear after my reply to Hugo. This makes it super confusing and is by itself a deal breaker:
Linking to a post shows a subtree
Thereās a subtle bar telling you this, but itās easy to miss it and get confused.
Mobile rendering is pretty broken
This is clearly not finished.
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Absolutely, I for one will complain if nested view is forced upon me (I agree with all the concerns you note in the rest of your post). And as PEP delegate for packaging PEPs (at least until the packaging council is formed) Iād impose a ban on any packaging PEP discussions being nested, as I have to review the full thread, and I wonāt be able to do that if nesting is switched on.
To be clear, Iām not saying I couldnāt learn to read nested threads. It would just take a lot of time, and while I was learning I wouldnāt want to be expected to make any significant decisions based on a nested thread/discussion.
Iām fine with nesting as a viewer choice, but not as an attribute of a topic.
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Thanks @ambv, @jonathandekhtiar, @Quercus, @hugovk and anyone else for testing it out, building a thread, capturing the details, and sharing your experiences - thatās super helpful to see firsthand where the deficiencies are right now for this forum.
Hopefully the Discourse devs check in on our instance for nested replies type topics, and now weāve produced a signal of some things weād want to see changed before we revisit the change.
If mods wish to close this topic, please feel free to do so!
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One other really bad āfeatureā of nested mode which I just discovered. In normal mode, if I open a topic Iāve already read, the display starts positioned at the first unread message, so I can start reading immediately. In nested mode, it doesnāt do that - it positions me at the start of the discussion, which would be utterly useless in a thread containing hundreds of messages.
I guess this is just another aspect of the whole āyou canāt tell what messages are unreadā problem with nested mode, but it actually makes it feel like they designed nested mode with little or no thought about how people actually read discussions in practice
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