OSDev.org

Posted: **Tue May 01, 2007 6:11 pm**

A Idea For The Natural Flow Of Conversation In A Forum While Maintaining On-Topic Conversation.

I was thinking just a few seconds ago, and yes in some rare moments the gears and sprokets do start turning the right direction in my brain.

About the way we do conversation on this forum. You know it seems often we end up going off-topic. I even find myself at times about to make a post or thinking of making one and realizing that I would be going off-topic too much.

However the truth being that most of the time it is not so much as going off-topic as it is just attaching a separate but related thread of conversation. I wish we had some really advanced forum software out there that could allow this type of natural flow while still leaving the main thread intact.

Maybe allowing the user to use a "Make Branch" button so that two conversation end points would be created instead of overriding one end point for the sake of another.

But at that same time I can start to have a hard time imagining a visual concept that could accommodate this functionality in a useful way. Maybe something more graphical with a tree look to it with sections that become compressed in between the origin node and the branch and ending points.

Code: Select all

What are some good ideas for memory management?
                                |
                             (post) --> (branch) "XYZ in my opinion is not good."
                                |                                             |
                             (post)                                     (post)
                                |                                         (post)
                              (post) ---> (branch) "You use GCC for you're kernel?"
                                                                          |
                                                                      (post)
                                                                      (post)
                                                                      (post)

Posted: **Wed May 02, 2007 2:58 am**

so something like the slashdot.org comments/forum

Posted: **Wed May 02, 2007 8:37 am**

I think just starting a new thread is a good solution. "Threaded" conversations (replies in a tree-like order) sound great in theory, but IMHO they are really painful to use in practice.

Posted: **Wed May 02, 2007 10:02 am**

I hate the "slashdot" style of comments/forum.. It's considerably lame and hard to follow.

So many hidden posts.. Very easy to get lost

I wouldn't like such a transition of OSDev forums..

Posted: **Wed May 02, 2007 10:26 am**

I installed the topic split modification for phpbb here so mods can split the topics if they change topic too much.

Posted: **Wed May 02, 2007 11:04 am**

Brynet-Inc wrote:I hate the "slashdot" style of comments/forum.. It's considerably lame and hard to follow.

So many hidden posts.. Very easy to get lost

I wouldn't like such a transition of OSDev forums..

The concept is nice but it wasn't implemented properly. The new slashdot thing is a lot better (you can uncollapse stuff without going to a subpage) but it's 1. too slow and 2. still clunky since you can barely collapse stuff again.

I think it could work a lot better.

Posted: **Wed May 02, 2007 11:38 am**

Threaded discussion is a "necessary evil" for forums like Slashdot that can accumulate hundreds of posts in a few hours. With low-traffic forums like ours, I don't see a point.

Posted: **Wed May 02, 2007 3:24 pm**

You might be right on that one in it being a necessary evil for sites that can accumulate hundreds of posts.

OSDev.org

A idea for natural flow of conversation.

A idea for natural flow of conversation.