Change quest comments to be threaded.

[neilb]

Right now you can only add comments at the end of the list of comments. It would be helpful if you could reply to a comment. All replies would be indented from the target comment, resulting in a threaded view.

This would be very helpful for the stencil discussion: each stencil would be a new top-level comment, with all comments on that idea being nested under it.

[berekuk]

Threaded comments have some advantages (better structure, basically), and some disadvantages (you can't follow the quest by reading the last N comments; indentation can get awkward).

I'm not saying I'm completely against threaded comments, I like Reddit and HN, but note also that Facebook, for example, avoided adding them for a long time, and when they finally did, recently, it's just a limited version with no more than one level of nesting.

I suspect there are larger philosophical consequences about which types of discussions each of hese approaches encourages. I feel like usual quest's lifespan is very ordered: it's created, discussed, and then completed or abandoned. (Note that Github comments are linear, rt.cpan.org's are too... in fact, do you know any issue tracker with threaded comments? I can't recall.)

PS: I'll leave this issue open for now, in case you or I or anyone else comes up with a strong argument for or against it. But so far I'm not sure it's worth changing.

[neilb]

My first thought: make it selectable on a per-quest basis, defaulting to the current method. That way I could switch a long running quest (eg the one mentioned above) to a threaded view.

All this separate from whether it shouldn't be fully threaded, or just to the first level. I'll mull that some more.