New Message: Non-hierarchical responses

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A new message was posted:

Address: http://manila.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$1349

By: Matt Deatherage (frontier at gcsf.com)

I suppose this is too late for Manila 9.6 if the feature creep really has stopped, but here goes anyway:

Comments on most Weblogs are not hierarchical. They're a simple linear list of comments, from oldest to newest. This is how comments work on Manila /only/ if you're using Radio Community Server and the pop-up comments window.

Unfortunately, as has been mentioned here previously, RCS is to spammers like honey is to fire ants. If we turn it on or use it on any site on the server, it's overrun by spammers within days. No one's suggested any way to block spammers from adding comments via RCS, so we had to turn it off years ago, and it stays off.

That leaves Manila's discussion-group formatted comments, and in a lot of ways, they're just not as desirable. I appreciate the powerful option of having a hierarchical discussion, but I would like it to be an /option/.

If a news item on one of our sites generates a lot of discussion, casual readers would never know. Everything is a child of the first response, so the news item on the home page always says "Discuss (1 response)", even if those responses have six or fifteen or 200 more responses behind them.

I tried undoing this in the database myself on one message, with less than satisfying results. The news item in question had six comments, but each was a reply to the previous one, so the \{discussLink\} macro dutifully reported "1 response". I changed the "inReplyTo" field for each of the six comment messages to be the parent message, but that didn't change "discussLink". It only changed the "in reply to" field in the header of the discussion group page for each affected message.

Then I tried adding all six message numbers to the "responses" list for the original news item. That indeed got "discussLink" to say "6 responses." But when I clicked on that "Discuss" link, it was a shambles. It listed the sixth response, then the fifth response and the sixth one indented in reply to it, then the fourth response (with the fifth one indented and the fourth one indented under it), and so on. In other words, every response also had the responses to it listed hierarchically underneath it. Well, I shouldn't have expected anything else, I guess.

Finally, I went back to all six messages and emptied their "responses" list in their tables, so Manila would not think they had any responses of their own. This almost achived the goal, but is where I had to stop. "discussLink" generated "6 responses", and clicking on it showed each response on the page only once - but they're in reverse chronological order, so the newest response is the top link.

Upon consideration in typing this out, I think most of my concerns would be addressed if "discussLink" printed the total number of responses in the tree, not just the number of top-level responses. I don't mind the hierarchical listing if the count is correct on the home page so people can see there's an actual discussion happening. In the long run, though, it would be nice to have the option of flat, non-hierarchical discussion display, like RCS does and most other Weblog servers do as well.

This is a Manila site... http://manila.userland.com/.