Threaded viewing?

[Douglas]

One of my clients is requesting the ability to have threaded views in addition to the views that we have here, and that we have the ability to have it change whichever view to be the default one for users, and changable via profiles.

I would also like to see the ability to change the display order (ascending vs descending) in actual thread viewing (newest first/oldest first)

[pulpitfire]

there is an option to change the thread viewing order, isn't there?  i mean you can already select something like "show latest thread/article first"?

[Grudge]

Threaded viewing is something I might try modding in the future but it's a LONG way off - it's a pretty huge MOD for anyone to write but worth it in the end I bet.

[David]

I think vB implemented threaded view very elegantly.

[dschwab9]

I like this as well, but it would require a reply button next to each post and some extra database fields so it know who replied to what post, wouldn't it?

UBB does this, and I think it's selectable in your profile.

[Grudge]

Yep, when you word it like that it's very easy. However, it's still a lot of work and the template for it is nightmarish due to the changes (how you present the threaded view point - iframe etc??) Maybe I'd like to see it as a feature one day but until that day comes we're looking at mod for sure - and a complicated one at that

[dschwab9]

I agree with you it's complicate, but why would the template be hard to make?  Look how UBB does it - http://bbs.off-road.com/ubbthreads/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Board=offroadsuzuki&Number=1244294&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&vc=1

It's just keeping the entire thread at the bottom with the selected post shown at the top.

[Grudge]

Well - I still think that's tricky! I mean, if you have, say, a 200 page thread and you obviously don't want to display it all on one page it gets hard to work out what you show on each page. I mean if a post has a parent that is 100 pages ago do you show just it, without it's parent, or it with it's parent. How do you handle other child posts of the parent? Do you show the parents parent?

It seems to work fine for *reasonable* length threads but don't know about full length. then theres also the question of posts you haven't read. Do you mark them individually (somehow) or mark them all new that are new since the thread last read, but then that leads to difficulties as the thread is marked read soon as you enter it, so then you might want to set a session variable and it goes on...