<p>It's my preferences that forums be flat. That is, one continuous stream of comments, flowing like a discussion, each person contributing to the last thing said. For those times when a user must reply to something somebody said five posts prior, he uses the "quote" option. That's my opinion.</p><p>However, some people like nested forums. In a nested forum, the level and position of your comment's placement depends on where you click "reply". This results in a tree-like forum where not all recent forum posts exist at the bottom. For example:</p><p> </p><hr size="2" width="100%" /><pre>Topic Post<br />- Comment 1 to topic post<br />- Comment 2 to topic post<br />- - Comment 1 to Comment 2 of topic post<br />- - Comment 2 to Comment 2 of topic post<br />- - - Comment 1 to Comment 2 to Comment 2 of topic post. <br />- Comment 3 to topic post <br />- - Comment 1 to Comment 3 to topic post <br />- Comment 4 to topic post <br /></pre><hr size="2" width="100%" /><p> </p><p>Etc. In the above example, "- - - Comment 1 to Comment 2 to Comment 2 of topic post" might be new but be located upstream of old posts, just indented to show parental positioning. I could accomplish this through indentation of comments, but I wonder if others find this style as difficult to find new posts as I do. Additionally, it runs the very common potential that people hit "reply" in the wrong place and their comment goes in a place that's hard to follow the conversation.</p><p>Even though it's not my preference, I realize others have preferences and ask that the testers give their opinions. I don't want to make it an option for each client-side user; I want it to be a site-wide solution... this would result to some messed up formatting (flatlisters like me might hit reply at an inappropriately nested place that reads fine in a flat list but not in a hierarchical one).</p>
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