[Stephen Gerringer]

Hi Drewie – I figured I’d reply here, to the post you deleted, to give you a heads up on changes in the structure of threads (as opposed to a reply your more substantial response).

Previously, when a user would “Reply” directly to a comment, the individual they are replying to would be notified (assuming they selected “Notify me of follow-up replies via email box”), but the reply itself would appear at the very end of all messages in the thread, which was no different than what happens when someone posts a new comment that isn’t a direct reply.

However, there are only so many posts per page (25, I believe), and once we’d hit that, further comments would appear on a new page in the thread. Some of our discussions in the MythBlast forum stretched on for three, four, or five pages, and many couldn’t find posts they wanted to reply to, not knowing they were looking at the bottom of page 3 and the earlier comment they were looking for was on page 1 – and folks new to a thread weren’t clear just what post out of dozens of comments a reply was referencing.

So we switched to nested threads. When you click “Reply” on someone’s post, your response will appear immediately after and slightly inset from the original post; the the same happens when the person you are replying to or anyone else responds directly to your reply. The advantage to this that one can follow a complete exchange at once, rather than reading a comment and then finding a reply to that comment some ten or twelve posts later in the thread.

If posting a general comment where you don’t click a “Reply” button, that remark will appear at the end of scroll. (If referencing comments from more than one individual in your post, I’d suggest including the index number of the each post in the body of your text so readers can find the earlier comments).

It’s still not perfect – not everyone, whether now or the earlier format, clicks the Reply button on a post they are responding to, and not everyone enables email notifications in their post, but it seems a step in the right direction.