Threaded discussions

[domenic]

This is a big, hard, feature, but...

If you look at e.g. the official archives, you see a nice thread structure.

Any chance on duplicating this, with e.g. indentation levels?

[ForbesLindesay]

I semi-deliberately attempted to line-arise each discussion. I think each thread should be readable in a continuous fashion like a git-hub issue. Where it doesn't read well like that I think posts should be edited so they make sense in a linear fashion.

We could try and do something to make them a little more threaded, but it would add a great deal of complexity and I think often you'd find they were threaded when they'd make just as much sense in a linear order.

[domenic]

After a while using the linear order I'm pretty convinced you're right. I think something subtle though, e.g. a line from a post to the one it's replying to, might be a nice addition. Let's keep this open as a low-priority experiment that I or someone else will hopefully one day run.

The first step would probably be taking an existing thread and trying to draw such lines in MS Paint and see what it looks like.

[ForbesLindesay]

Possibly, it would also require a second parse of the archive :) To properly thread messages you have to use the meta data that comes with the message. That was available when we were parsing the actual .txt archives but it's not now that we're parsing the html archives. Since we're now using message time (accurate to the nearest second) + email address as the ID, we could parse both archives HTML (for URL & message subject + message body) and txt (for metadata) but that would add a lot more processing logic.

I agree, first step is for someone to mock it up if they're keen. If that looks really useful it may be worth pursuing.