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Comment by Ralfp | Hacker News Reader

I would like to use this opportunity to also mention a forum software I am building, Misago: https://misago-project.org/ (GitHub: https://github.com/rafalp/Misago/)

Around year ago I've started aggressively pursuing improvements to it's UX and features which to my surprise resulted in project getting new (small) wave of attention and a lot of great feedback on what else is missing and what needs changed that I am working on at.

I've grown on old school forums, phpBB2, Invision Power Board 2.3, vBulletin 3 and I am trying to hit a sweet spot between old and new, taking inspiration from both other modern solutions like Discourse or Flarum, but also from latest versions of XenForo and Invision Community.

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Every little icon on the right side has a scrollbar on mobile Android chrome.

Thanks. You mean icons in navbar or icons on thread list?

On the thread list. They appear briefly on Firefox android, then disappear.

It looks like thread replies are presented sequentially rather than nested. Is this something you're looking to support in the future?

No, classic forums never really offered threaded discussions alike to HN or Reddit.

IPB and vBulletin had "threaded" mode where you would see a tree of replies, but it would only display a single reply, requiring you to manually select next reply to see in the UI.

In future I plan to track which post the poster clicked "reply" for and have UI to let you see direct replies to given posts, or see that post was made as a direct reply to other post, but I am not planning a "proper" tree view like how reddit does it.

Also some good opinion pieces from Discourse's creator on the subject:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design... https://blog.codinghorror.com/discussions-flat-or-threaded/

Imagine this thread without threading. It would be 30% of its current value.

Reddit, Digg etc became popular partly _because_ of threading.

But Reddit/Digg are commentary sites, and most forums aren't.

That may be true for many of the most popular subreddits, but many of them are built for discussion and the nested replies are still considerably easier to follow than the linear firehose that is a more traditional forum.

I'm aware threading is not a thing in "classic forums".

I think threading is the killer feature that allowed spaces like Reddit to so thoroughly replace "classic forums" over the last 13 years.

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