'new comment' question

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!

are we getting a NAS discord site ?

Hi aidie

I'm not aware of any plans, though I could check. Are there particular features of Discord that you would value? On the one hand, it's great to have a choice of so many different platforms, providing different features. On the other, this place is really valuable in sharing experiences from which others can benefit, and it's good to have those in a central location, with the ability for those who wish to do so to exchange private messages with chosen friends.

Of course, you've kindly provided a useful way to demonstrate my previous point  You replied to me, rather than to Jon, and I am replying to you, and we're discussing something slightly different from the original topic, in a sub-topic of our own. Anyone wanting to go back to the original can reply directly to @Jon's message.

Hi aidie

I'm not aware of any plans, though I could check. Are there particular features of Discord that you would value? On the one hand, it's great to have a choice of so many different platforms, providing different features. On the other, this place is really valuable in sharing experiences from which others can benefit, and it's good to have those in a central location, with the ability for those who wish to do so to exchange private messages with chosen friends.

Of course, you've kindly provided a useful way to demonstrate my previous point  You replied to me, rather than to Jon, and I am replying to you, and we're discussing something slightly different from the original topic, in a sub-topic of our own. Anyone wanting to go back to the original can reply directly to @Jon's message.