Replies/threading annoyance

When one clicks on ‘replies’ to expand the responses to a post, they then appear duplicated further down the page.

And am I the only one who this annoys? Does anyone else find that this makes following the conversation frustrating and sometimes confusing? Is it a bug or a feature?

@jsick as the Discourse guy, and @mjuric as the self-professed chief nitpicker :stuck_out_tongue:

I never expected clicking on Replies to magically remove them from further down in the page.

I guess I didn’t expect them to be removed, I just didn’t think they would exist there in the first place.

On Facebook (or just about any other threaded commenting environment I can think of), when you reply directly to something it spawns its own sub-thread, and doesn’t also appear as its own post on the parent thread. Am I losing my mind here?

  1. Yes, thread display is local and does not get rid of the chronological view.
  2. People in DESC and here have expressed annoyance at this.
  3. Some find that this makes following the conversation confusing; others like it.
  4. It is exactly as the designer of Discourse has said he prefers it, so it’s not a bug as such.
  5. Because of #4, I suspect that this is quite hard to change.

Ah, thank you, I see that I am not alone here, and that Robert’s topic is in fact identical. Glad I’m not going crazy, and just seems I will have to live with it. Thanks!

@merlin, I’ve explained Discourse’s threading design in Understanding and Using Discourse’s Flat Threading I hope that will help you.

I read it and I am actually sold on the idea now! It’s a very informative post which I’d encourage everyone to read, and actually totally changed my mind on the matter.

It’ll take some getting used to, but I now agree that this is probably the way to go!