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Buddy read comment threading
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deeohMay 26, 2023
As a participant in a buddy read, I expect that when I click "reply" on a comment, whether it's a top level comment or a reply itself, my comment is nested as a reply to that comment, so that I can follow the threads of conversation.
For example, I'm in a buddy read right now and all replies to the comment I made at 100% and replies to any sub-comments are displayed in time order (I assume). The interesting thing is that they do get displayed properly nested at the time of creation, but after reloading the view they are no longer correct. I can provide a link to the buddy read in question if that's useful, thanks!
Comments
Hello — I recently — days ago — had to change how the comments were displayed due to performance/recursion issues. We used to allow infinite nesting but it became un-workable very quickly for chatty buddy reads.
I still store the original parent IDs so that information isn't lost and I'll see what I can do going forward.
Nadia that makes a lot of sense! Maybe there’s a hybrid approach where you allow nesting up to N levels deep and then you grey out the reply button on any comments that would go deeper than that.
deeoh I did consider that but I really like the idea of anyone being able to reply to any comment. I will definitely troubleshoot this though and am glad I'm still storing the specific comments replied to as maybe there's room for different views for specific conversations or something. 🤔
Nadia It was a smart move to continue storing that info! There’s definitely some solution that will work. I’m trying to think of what other sites with similar comment styles do; maybe something like Reddit’s approach could work for you, too?
Edit: I’m in software, too, so I can’t help but problem solve haha
deeoh I researched Reddit and IG and I was led to believe that nesting was limited. In fact, our new approach matches IG's, where you can reply to any comment, but the indentation is only one level deep and the comments are in order of time!
I guess the alternative to arbitrary nesting levels would be to just make sure to post a new top level comment for each train of thought, even if that means you have 4 comments starting from the same page/percent.