When a comment thread reaches the last tier, no reply link is provided
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@motre thank you for your considered response and very helpful input. Yes, I am very familiar with threaded/ non-threaded discussions (I’ve been a user of the Internet for over twenty years now).
Your own post on the thread in question is very useful, as it highlights the problem. You’ll note that your comment <b>does</b> have a reply link (since it’s at ‘level 3’), whereas my comment above yours does not (‘by design’, since it’s at ‘level 4’ — a ‘closed’ thread).
Although the level 4 thread is closed, there are still three ways to respond to comment-910:
- I, as an administrator of the blog, can locate comment-910 in the comment interface, and use that to reply to it. This creates an additional response in the ‘closed’ thread, at the final level. (In fact, I’ve just done this, to illustrate).
- An ‘expert user’ can get the same effect — continuing a ‘closed’ thread — by using the reply link that follows the penultimate comment in that thread (comment-908).
- Thirdly — and this is where the real problem lies — someone can wish to respond to the end of the thread and be unable to do so without resorting to the (new-thread-starting) comment entry box at the foot of the page.
Perhaps my suggested resolution to this problem/ feature — ie (as I keep repeating) to add a final reply link that mimics the action of the penultimate one — is not ideal. Should users wish to continue such a closed thread, if it were to go on for any length then they would have to resort to using @labels, as we have been doing here, else chaos would set in fairly quickly.
But computers (so I’m told) are supposed to make life easier. They’re not doing what they say on the tin when they create barriers to effective communication, as they have done for the author of comment-912 (whose unfamilarity with the system encouraged him to create an orphan post), or user frustration (as they all too often do for me!).
Thanks for listening, and if you do have any bright ideas, please don’t be a stranger.
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I’ve yet to see anywhere that computers have ever made life easier.
If I understand you right, what you are suggesting would effectively make the thread level at the limit operate as if it were a flat list of sequential comments there (with multiple instances where different thread paths reach the limit). I guess that would be a practical way to deal with it logically. Obviously, they didn’t program it that way.
I don’t know if there would be any drawbacks to that or how complicated it would be to do it. But you might make a suggestion for it in the Ideas Forum. I did run into exactly this problem posting my first comments to another blog when I started at WP … I could not find a reply and figured it was an HTML error (bad generated HTML or bad interpretation of HTML by my year old browser). I ended up replying at the bottom reply button just as you had described. I only later figured out what happened. I think it would help user experience to have a reply button there, whatever way it is going to handle the reply.
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@motre
“<i>If I understand you right, what you are suggesting would effectively make the thread level at the limit operate as if it were a flat list of sequential comments there (with multiple instances where different thread paths reach the limit).</i>”You do indeed understand me right; thank you for summing it up so succinctly.
“<i>I guess that would be a practical way to deal with it logically.</i>”
Thank you; this confirms that it’s Not Just Me ™.
“<i>Obviously, they didn’t program it that way.</i>”
That shouldn’t be a problem; I don’t know, but suspect that it wouldn’t be that hard to implement this as an upgrade. Sadly, the ‘happiness engineer’ and ‘staff’ responses above indicate indicate that Those Who Could If They Wanted To believe in their minds that it ain’t broke so they ain’t gonna fix it. While I do appreciate that it’s impractical to implement every last item on users’ wishlists, I’m always saddened to find that quality seems so low on so many designers’ priorities. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” should be required reading for all designers, IMO.
This, my first foray into these forums, has not been a very satisfying experience. You suggest visiting the Ideas Forum: frankly, I don’t have the energy for it. If those ‘over there’ are anything like those ‘over here’: they won’t read old posts, they’ll instead ask for information already provided; and they’ll ask me to rephrase what it is I’m trying to say and then bugger off, never to return.
Bah.
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A flat list of sequential comments for a thread would be excellent. I do have most of mine set at the max, and it does get ugly unless people make one word replies as it nears towards the limit.
Of course, I also (for some reason) have some extremely thoughtful readers, who do keep returning to a thread and often making longer points.
This isn’t a single issue topic really though. One of the advantages about threading is the notification in the orange box. I comment on pedantry’s (for example) and I see a number change, and the comment, and I can reply to that all from my own blog without even faffing around with ‘comments I’ve made’.
Starting a new thread does take away from the sequence, but in a fairly tight topic, I don’t think it’s an issue, unless one or two people join in the same thread. Which, they have done, I must be honest.
Flat would be great, I must agree. But in the meantime, I’ll leave mine set at max as not everyone knows the workaround by using a comment about to add further to the thread. (which makes a nonsense of having a max actually, but hey who cares?).
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@roughseasinthemed thank you for bringing me back here again, and for reminding me about the main reason this feature is a problem… which is that it has the potential to cause confusion for newcomers to my blog. And along with the confusion, there’s the perennial issue of the feeling of ‘oops I did something wrong’ — when nine times out of ten it’s not the user who’s at fault, it’s the system. Since ‘computers are infallible’, the only ones at whom one can legitimately point the finger are the designers, who all too often hide behind “but it’s working for me, it must be you” and “finger trouble” and “it’s working as designed”.
I don’t want my visitors being confused and feeling belittled, I want them happy, so they come back.
As it’s clearly not just me that has experienced this issue, I expected more of the support folk than “it ain’t broke”. I had thought they’d be more interested in improving the user experience. Perhaps they’re simply overloaded, like most support staff; their inability to read certainly indicates that.
Bitter? /whome?
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I was really hoping there was an answer for this problem here. I had a few visitors post a new comment thread because they thought it wasn’t possible to reply to comments on the inner-most level. Using the reply button for the previous level is counter-intuitive, so they just give up and start anew.
It should be rather straightforward. If you have a threaded comment system and convert to flat, comments simply show up by date/time, so all the mechanic necessary to solve the problem are already in place.
All that is needed is for the reply button to work as if there was no limit, but display everything as flat once you get to the visibility limit. That would even enable administrators to increase the limit and have previously “flat” comments show up as nested. In my mind, it’s probably even easier to make it work like this than how it works right now, since you’d have a single behavior for replying no matter how you set it for display. All that would change when setting limits is how they are rendered.
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All that is needed is for the reply button to work as if there was no limit, but display everything as flat once you get to the visibility limit.
But this would confuse commenters as well since their comment would not appear beneath the one they are replying to, and they would likely wonder where there comment went, and how many would think to scroll down to the very bottom to see if their comment showed up there?
This is one of the reasons that I seriously dissuade my clients from using it, and especially if they get lots of comments. It always turns into a mess, no matter what.
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But this would confuse commenters as well since their comment would not appear beneath the one they are replying to, and they would likely wonder where there comment went, and how many would think to scroll down to the very bottom to see if their comment showed up there?
After you post, the page refreshes with a direct anchor link to your comment, so no one needs to search for their own comments after posting. This “problem” doesn’t exist, unless you’re using an AJAX comment system that doesn’t scroll the page to the comment after posting (which most I have used do anyway).
As for knowing what comment each one is in reply to, that can be easily solved by adding a “in reply to [comment-link]” to the theme when that specific comment is being displayed in “flat mode”, which can happen either when comments are set to non-nested, or when that comment is on the deepest nested level allowed.
It’s a much more flexible solution than not allowing replying to comments at all when they are flat or on the deepest level.
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