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'new comment' question

Jon

Hi,

I was wondering if there was any differnces between replying to a post using the 'new comment' box at the bottom as opposed to using the 'reply' link after an individual post.

Its probably obvious but I can't work it out.

Smile

Parents

  • Hi

    The new comment box generally appears if there have been no replies in the thread so far. It lets you reply to the initial message.

    The reply buttons allow you to reply to specific messages, making comments on what that particular contributor has said. So, you can reply to a reply, and so on. This creates a "threaded" presentation, which is shown using indentation and bars as far as possible (though obviously we can't keep indenting forever, if we get replies to replies to replies to replies...) To see it working significantly, look at any thread that has a large number of replies.

    I know that different people here will have different views on whether that's better than just putting the latest message at the bottom, in a "linear" way. It can get a bit complicated, if we get several different lines of conversation going on in the same thread, because the latest messages appear in different places in the thread. However, the advantage is that you don't get responses to particular comments appearing six or ten messages later, which also makes following things difficult. To deal with that, users of "linear" forums tend to do a lot of quoting of previous messages, leading to extremely long threads that mostly consist of quotes, repeating what has been said before.

    Facebook, for example, also uses threading and indentation. Older forum software often uses linear presentations. No one model is universally agreed as best.

    Hope this helps!

Reply

  • Hi

    The new comment box generally appears if there have been no replies in the thread so far. It lets you reply to the initial message.

    The reply buttons allow you to reply to specific messages, making comments on what that particular contributor has said. So, you can reply to a reply, and so on. This creates a "threaded" presentation, which is shown using indentation and bars as far as possible (though obviously we can't keep indenting forever, if we get replies to replies to replies to replies...) To see it working significantly, look at any thread that has a large number of replies.

    I know that different people here will have different views on whether that's better than just putting the latest message at the bottom, in a "linear" way. It can get a bit complicated, if we get several different lines of conversation going on in the same thread, because the latest messages appear in different places in the thread. However, the advantage is that you don't get responses to particular comments appearing six or ten messages later, which also makes following things difficult. To deal with that, users of "linear" forums tend to do a lot of quoting of previous messages, leading to extremely long threads that mostly consist of quotes, repeating what has been said before.

    Facebook, for example, also uses threading and indentation. Older forum software often uses linear presentations. No one model is universally agreed as best.

    Hope this helps!

Children