On 8 Jun 2014, at 17:22, James Forrester <jforrester(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
— Krinkle
On Sunday, June 8, 2014, Martijn Hoekstra
<martijnhoekstra(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jun 8, 2014 at 1:18 AM, Martijn Hoekstra
<
martijnhoekstra(a)gmail.com <javascript:;>>
wrote:
> Flow stores the comments as a structured tree
That seems a fundamental mistake. A discussion isn't a tree, it's a dag at
best. It's possible for a single comment in a discussion to refer to zero
or more earlier comments,
Flow stores each discussion as a tree, with a Flow "Board" being a forest
of discussions for precisely this reason.
and it's also possible for a single comment
to
refer to part of an earlier comment, which means a comment isn't an
indivisable node.
Hmm. I'm not convinced that there has ever been a successful/useful/good
discussion system that encouraged sub-comment structured replies. In my
experience they are unusable morrasses of confusion. Instead, a lightweight
quoting tool achieves the specificity at the least complexity and greatest
clarity for users.
I could be convinced otherwise, but it'd need to be a fairly stunning
design concept.
J.
Throughout the years I've had to use at many different incarnations of conversation
workflows. Such as:
* Inline comments (such as on StackOverflow).
* Issues trackers (like Bugzila or GitHub Issues).
* Mailing threads (as rendered by Gmail or Apple Mail, both for 1-on-1 threads and those
from mailing lists).
* Helpdesk ticket systems.
* Disqus.
* Feedback systems (like GetSatisfaction and UserEcho).
* WordPress comments.
* LiquidThreads.
* Your typical 90s-style forum board (like phpBB or vBulletin).
* ..
And I can't really come to any conclusion other than that the user experience is
significantly worse when any of these used a tree structure (especially LiquidThreads and
forum boards). It always ends up a mess.
Fortunately, most of these have now either exclusively opted for a linear model or have an
option to view it as a linear model (I think LiquidThread is the only exception on this
list). Some systems, like Disqus and WordPress comments, handle it by only allowing a very
limited number of nesting levels, though I'm not convinced this is useful.
I agree with James and feel that having a good system for citing would significantly
increase user experience more than any tree structure ever would (and having a tree of any
kind always negatively impacts user experience).
-- Timo