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

Arantor said:

Navigating a threaded topic is really the same as navigating a large email chain where people are replying to bits of it, and actually most of the email lists still work this way.

If you read the Linux Kernel Mailing List for examples that’s how that works, as per lkml.org

I’ve never been fond of the sub conversation behaviours it produces, but I’m also not sure I agree with the comments about the UX “being there” now. Discourse for example does some of this stuff with one or two level nesting, which means reply-to-this-message buttons everywhere and watching a group of users who are all very technical get this wrong so regularly (for two years) demonstrated to me that the approach isn’t as effective there as it might seem.

Reddit does better with this but I’ve still seen that issue happen there too where people accidentally reply to the wrong thing. People tend to get this less wrong on flat conversations in general.

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Replying to your point has, in some small way at least, broken the flow of the discussion stemming from the OP. Only you should get a notification that I've replied to you, not everyone following the thread. Im replying to YOU and your points, not the people who replied to OP or OP. Its very natural and far more human to take you aside (without the burden of creating a DM), and not derail the main conversation.

We can disagree about what is good UX or not I suppose, but its at least my opinion that generally speaking this type of ux is now a solved thing and there is no reason not to support it. XenForo or any software thats been maintained for 10+ years may have arguments against it such as resources or lack of energy or will, but there really are not too many other good reasons. Simply look at just about any major long form and many short form discussion platforms that are mainstream. Any comments system, slack, discord, reddit, they cannot all be wrong.

Back to on topic, and I have to state as such since the conversation is linear...we can say silly things like "forums are not reddit or are not social media" but this is simply a ridiculous argument. Reddit is almost exactly a forum, if you ignore the size of it and a few other liberties. Its just a very very successful one. And social media is effectively just hyper optimized engagement platforms, which forums would benefit by learning from. We can debate this another ten years but its just simply misinformed. Many things can be true at the same time. Forums need to be highly engaging (a la modern social platforms) , offer new ways to interact with others such as short form discussion, all while maintaining traditional long form discussion support.

Reddit gets the threaded discussion layout correct, to where you can clearly follow the individual conversations, expand or collapse separate threads as needed, and it's all still readable on a single page, as opposed to the ancient text-based forums (like wwwboard) where you had to click each message header to read the message in the thread, which was very tedious.

Since my earliest forum experiences were the threaded variety like wwwboard, the basic idea makes sense to me. But I doubt that most forum users are going to warm to something unfamiliar, and most admins aren't going to accept it either.

I've been able to use the xenforo Profile posts / Status posts for a more conversational nested forum. Forum leaders or if I want all members are able to start new threads and users can reply to any thread in the list.

Dad. said:

Replying to your point has, in some small way at least, broken the flow of the discussion stemming from the OP. Only you should get a notification that I've replied to you, not everyone following the thread. Im replying to YOU and your points, not the people who replied to OP or OP. Its very natural and far more human to take you aside (without the burden of creating a DM), and not derail the main conversation.

We can disagree about what is good UX or not I suppose, but its at least my opinion that generally speaking this type of ux is now a solved thing and there is no reason not to support it. XenForo or any software thats been maintained for 10+ years may have arguments against it such as resources or lack of energy or will, but there really are not too many other good reasons. Simply look at just about any major long form and many short form discussion platforms that are mainstream. Any comments system, slack, discord, reddit, they cannot all be wrong.

Back to on topic, and I have to state as such since the conversation is linear...we can say silly things like "forums are not reddit or are not social media" but this is simply a ridiculous argument. Reddit is almost exactly a forum, if you ignore the size of it and a few other liberties. Its just a very very successful one. And social media is effectively just hyper optimized engagement platforms, which forums would benefit by learning from. We can debate this another ten years but its just simply misinformed. Many things can be true at the same time. Forums need to be highly engaging (a la modern social platforms) , offer new ways to interact with others such as short form discussion, all while maintaining traditional long form discussion support.

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I will make one argument regarding Reddit... How often do you fully read every reply to a moderately active topic? I read some of the top comments, and some replies, but generally I end up leaving the thread shortly after.

My personal opinion is that thread discussions do not often lead to worthwhile conversations (obviously there are outliers on both sides), and thus do not lead to worthwhile content. It is rare that I find a good reply to a top comment/post that is 3+ levels deep in the thread chain, whereas with a linear discussion depending on the topic I will usually find at least a few good replies that add to the conversation; again, this is not always the case, but I would say at least 60-70% of the time it is true. More often than not, a lot of the first post or two of a post on Reddit is someone making a joke and then the chain just continues down the same joke for 10-20+ replies, which really does not add much to the conversation.

If threaded encourages more activity (which I feel it does), and linear encourages better content (which I also feel it does) it becomes a quality vs a quantity argument. I will almost always pick quality over quantity, because there are other things I can do to encourage more activity, whereas it is harder to get good content posted.

That said, threaded 100% is better for things where the replies do not really matter much for other content types where the replies matter much less than the original content itself.

Forsaken said:

I will make one argument regarding Reddit... How often do you fully read every reply to a moderately active topic? I read some of the top comments, and some replies, but generally I end up leaving the thread shortly after.

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Its a fair point but to me this isnt the issue of threaded vs linear, but rather just that there are far more threads and so its hard to read all replies. A smaller forum you might read them all, linear or threaded really. If thats the type of user you are.

Since XF has Q&A content type, might as well follow StackOverflow's format.

It would be very awkward to provide an answer like "Can you provide more details about your questions such as blah blah.." to a question. Or to quote an answer and reply "This is a partially incorrect answer because...". In these few cases, it would be best to comment to the question and the answer.

Existing disucssion: https://xenforo.com/community/threads/allow-nested-replies-in-q-a-threads.181812/

Dad. said:

Its a fair point but to me this isnt the issue of threaded vs linear, but rather just that there are far more threads and so its hard to read all replies. A smaller forum you might read them all, linear or threaded really. If thats the type of user you are.

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Which is why I followed up with it being a quantity vs quality situation; I am more likely to read more if the quality of content is higher, as it is worth my time, rather than just reading every reply.

I can also really only base this off of my own opinions (trying to be unbiased using recent examples) as I haven't done the research on it, and as far as I know there never has been a conclusive case study on which user experience is better for whatever metric is valued by the study. But I literally read a 10-page forum post on a security forum regarding Crowdstrike (because I worked on a similar service before leaving that company), and several threads on Reddit regarding it; there was definitely a qualitative difference between the forum and Reddit posts and generally I did not find decent deeper than the first 3-4 replies to a comment on Reddit.

That said, I do feel threaded works well for Reddit due to scale, and because you literally could not have as much activity with a linear format. But I 100% find that to also lead to a drop in quality the deeper you go in comment threads, and generally even in the in the top most replies as well.

Dad. said:

Replying to your point has, in some small way at least, broken the flow of the discussion stemming from the OP. Only you should get a notification that I've replied to you, not everyone following the thread. Im replying to YOU and your points, not the people who replied to OP or OP. Its very natural and far more human to take you aside (without the burden of creating a DM), and not derail the main conversation.

We can disagree about what is good UX or not I suppose, but its at least my opinion that generally speaking this type of ux is now a solved thing and there is no reason not to support it. XenForo or any software thats been maintained for 10+ years may have arguments against it such as resources or lack of energy or will, but there really are not too many other good reasons. Simply look at just about any major long form and many short form discussion platforms that are mainstream. Any comments system, slack, discord, reddit, they cannot all be wrong.

Back to on topic, and I have to state as such since the conversation is linear...we can say silly things like "forums are not reddit or are not social media" but this is simply a ridiculous argument. Reddit is almost exactly a forum, if you ignore the size of it and a few other liberties. Its just a very very successful one. And social media is effectively just hyper optimized engagement platforms, which forums would benefit by learning from. We can debate this another ten years but its just simply misinformed. Many things can be true at the same time. Forums need to be highly engaging (a la modern social platforms) , offer new ways to interact with others such as short form discussion, all while maintaining traditional long form discussion support.

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Strong disagreement about most of this, really.

First up, notifications - yes, I got a notification because you quoted me. The only other people who got a notification are those who opted into notifications for the whole thread (or possibly the whole board, though that seems unlikely). But the reality is that it’s not really a derailment - it’s a set of related observations that continue the discussion. That’s, well, how discussions work - they ebb and flow and meander as opinions gets added.

Slack and Discord both have the threaded nature except 1) each channel in both is free flowing, threads are explicitly a derailment of a specific conversation, 2) good luck finding those threads again in any even remotely busy venue, 3) good luck if a thread is opened in the wrong place, 4) Discord forum threads aren’t even available by default, you have to explicitly go through a bunch of hoops to even enable them suggesting even Discord has reservations about them, though regular threads exist and almost no one uses them anyway.

It would be a very different argument if these were every discussion on those platforms, but they’re the exception rather than the rule, and even then they have major UX failures that make them suitable for specific occasions rather than general use. (I say this as someone who has a work Slack where I have to read every message, and am an admin of several Discord servers including multiple that have the forum feature enabled, and frankly… no one likes the threads, the forum feature is preferred and that just spins up a number of linear threads and no need to have threads inside them.

The UX is certainly not solved - Discourse tried to reopen this debate quite firmly when it debuted, both in terms of “that’s a branch of conversation, open a new topic” and it’s one singular level of nested replies, and the pushback including from long-standing fans of threaded conversation was overwhelmingly “your UX is broken”.

I put it to you the other way: if threaded replies were in such demand, there would be every argument to implement - but it really isn’t in the demand you think it is, because there are new forum platforms coming out that also don’t implement it. If it were such a thing, why is no-one implementing it? Because even the very newest forums don’t have it, nor plan to implement it.

Dad. said:

Only you should get a notification that I've replied to you, not everyone following the thread.

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Well if Im following the thread I want to see all replies, OT or not. Some replies to specific posts can include On topic and off topic content - I wouldn't want the software to decide what I can get notifications for as the function is to watch the thread, explicitly all the thread until I stop watching it. Yes you could have an option to watch only direct replies to OP and not replies to other posts butI think it should be an option if you are going to have it.

Dad. said:

Any comments system, slack, discord, reddit, they cannot all be wrong.

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We should probably eat sh*it - fifty billion flies can't be wrong

It always depends on the usecase - tools like Slack or Discord are great for multi-paricipent, high scale, (almost) realtime communication where content usually isn't important / valuable after a short time.

Threaded communication is great for such usecases and it also works "okayish" for in-depth discussions with a (somewhat) limited amount of participating users (anyone still remebering Forté Agent or even FidoNet?), but there is a reason why pretty much every forum platform by now uses linear discussions only - even those that had a threaded mode in the past (like vBulletin).

Platforms like Slack totally suck when it comes to organized, curated content:

Arantor said:

2) good luck finding those threads again in any even remotely busy venue,
3) good luck if a thread is opened in the wrong place,

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So true, we use Slack at work and pretty much everybody hates it when you have to dig up some older content.
Unless you know pretty much exactly what to search where chances to find that content are ~ 0.

Kirby said:

We should probably eat sh*it - fifty billion flies can't be wrong

It always depends on the usecase - tools like Slack or Discord are great for multi-paricipent, high scale, (almost) realtime communication where content usually isn't important / valuable after a short time.

Threaded communication is great for such usecases and it also works "okayish" for in-depth discussions with a (somewhat) limited amount of participating users (anyone still remebering Forté Agent or even FidoNet?), but there is a reason why pretty much every forum platform by now uses linear discussions only - even those that had a threaded mode in the past (like vBulletin).

Platforms like Slack totally suck when it comes to organized, curated content:


So true, we use Slack at work and pretty much everybody hates it when you have to dig up some older content.
Unless you know pretty much exactly what to search where chances to find that content are ~ 0.

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I assume you aren't a fan of any analogy then. Comparing communications and discussions platforms to a...discussion platform, seems reasonable to me. We can agree Slack isnt great for organizing content, or Discord, but in the modern era where engagement is key, they should be heavily considered. What you are debating here, which I highlighted in my last past, is the difference between short form and long content. I agree long form content should be organized, but that doesn't mean we cannot learn from short form and apply good models.

At the heart we are debating what some users prefer vs others. Long form vs short form. Curated and moderated vs not. With search and vectorization strategies getting better at finding data, something self-hosted forums will always be behind on, the need for properly organized communications gets less important over time. And when it is important it should be perhaps held separately in specialized long forum discussion threads or some other similar mechanism.

Has anyone tried nested for guests that VerticalScop rolled out last year to their sites?

Kirby said:

We should probably eat sh*it - fifty billion flies can't be wrong

It always depends on the usecase - tools like Slack or Discord are great for multi-paricipent, high scale, (almost) realtime communication where content usually isn't important / valuable after a short time.

Threaded communication is great for such usecases and it also works "okayish" for in-depth discussions with a (somewhat) limited amount of participating users (anyone still remebering Forté Agent or even FidoNet?), but there is a reason why pretty much every forum platform by now uses linear discussions only - even those that had a threaded mode in the past (like vBulletin).

Platforms like Slack totally suck when it comes to organized, curated content:


So true, we use Slack at work and pretty much everybody hates it when you have to dig up some older content.
Unless you know pretty much exactly what to search where chances to find that content are ~ 0.

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Guilded had better threaded/forum implementation before Discord ; also had ability to publish articles as announcements. Then Roblox happened, and most people who do not care for Roblox left.

Dad. said:

but in the modern era where engagement is key

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Citation needed.

There are a number of Discords I am on that are debating going back to forums because while you get more 'engagement', good luck finding anything that isn't recent, which seems to happen more than people think and I swear every time this happens, everyone is Pikachu-surprised that it happens.

There are also far too many Discords where engagement is unusable because there are too many participants and the conversation moves on before you can possibly react.

Arantor said:

Citation needed.

There are a number of Discords I am on that are debating going back to forums because while you get more 'engagement', good luck finding anything that isn't recent, which seems to happen more than people think and I swear every time this happens, everyone is Pikachu-surprised that it happens.

There are also far too many Discords where engagement is unusable because there are too many participants and the conversation moves on before you can possibly react.

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Citation needed? For your claims as well I take it?

This is another argument that actually doesn't have anything to do with what I'm saying. Better moderation, better community management, type of community, etc. are more important in addressing the issue you are describing, not whether or not side conversations should not ping all users in a discussion or allow for derailed side conversations and hijacking of threads as is far too common here at good ol xenforo forums. Nor does it have anything to do with the simple fact that to attract attention from fly by night user traffic which leads to long term membership and help the forum or platform become sustainable, there must be some comparable functionality to the most engaging platforms of the day. "Been around the block" type personalities, as are far too common here, can claim that's false but not on planet earth where all of the worlds most popular communication platforms with very few exceptions are designed to be highly user friendly, engaging, and easy and intuitive to use. And effectively all are the feared "social media platforms". Why I have to argue this is beyond me as it's kind of like saying "good things work well". That's not to say that forums, or rather long forum discussion platforms, are not relevant or useful, very much the opposite imo as I prefer them, clearly, but there are plenty of features we the forum world should be adopting. It is that simple.

Not going to proofread (ironically something expected out of people on long form discussion platforms) so forgive me for any brashness but it's an old argument for me that has held back the space. I feel like I need to build something just to prove my point haha

Nah, just you’re making bold claims that aren’t being substantiated and there’s plenty to support them not being the case. The only speculation from the naysayers is the reason why threaded discussion continues to be the fringe minority. If it genuinely were as good as claimed, and as “solved” as claimed, everyone would presumably have adopted it as the default solution.

I’m not against the notion in theory but I haven’t seen a UI implementation that doesn’t confuse most users - even Reddit, the bastion of the format, has no shortage of people intentionally treating parts of it as linear, as well as people who get confused about where they’re replying to vs where they intended to reply to. This alone deflates the “UI is solved” argument when it clearly isn’t, and I’ve seen enough other cases over the last 20 years of it.

Thing is, I’m not the one making bold claims requiring proof. Any bold claim presented without evidence can be dismissed just as easily!

If you think it’s solved, please do go build it, show us how it’s done. I gave up on trying to figure out a viable solution over a decade ago and got on with my life.

If it were solved, this thread would not exist.

Just sharing, one of the local forum I frequently visited was using the [UW] Forum Comments System addon and the posts and comments were neatly organized. Nice and helpful posts received comments and appreciations.

They deactivated (or probably unsintall) it and now it has loads of "thank you @Username for the..." single-line replies which was supposed to be intended for a certain post. Their threads have usually 5+ useful posts from known users but they're buried with the single-line replies. You have to hop on pages to find them or lucky if someone quote them (rare). The sad thing is it become the norms in their forum. When a user reply a helpful post to a thread, it will be followed by lots of "thank you" replies. When other users reply an alternative, helpful posts after the "thank you" replies, it's rarely seen (based on thanks @Username) because it's already been buried in pages.

XẹnPixel said:

Just sharing, one of the local forum I frequently visited was using the [UW] Forum Comments System addon and the posts and comments were neatly organized. Nice and helpful posts received comments and appreciations.

They deactivated (or probably unsintall) it and now it has loads of "thank you @Username for the..." single-line replies which was supposed to be intended for a certain post. Their threads have usually 5+ useful posts from known users but they're buried with the single-line replies. You have to hop on pages to find them or lucky if someone quote them (rare). The sad thing is it become the norms in their forum. When a user reply a helpful post to a thread, it will be followed by lots of "thank you" replies. When other users reply an alternative, helpful posts after the "thank you" replies, it's rarely seen (based on thanks @Username) because it's already been buried in pages.

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I have been usıng @truonglv post reply addon for years. And I never have a problem with this addon. And if you uninstall or disable the addon, it is converting replies to quotes back automatically. That means you are not losing or messing anything. But I wish xenforo would offer this feature as native feature. Quotes are totally useless and similar to 50 years before technology.

Ah, you’ve never had a long post to reply to where you need to break it up paragraph by paragraph to reply to it in pieces, where quote’s strength really lies.