Reddit-alike comments threading improved Friday, 02 February 07

I'm running a social media site in Italy (oknotizie), and our comment system is modelled after the reddit's. Now we have quite a bit of visitors and threads with 50+ comments are not uncommon, and the limits of threading moving on the right is pretty clear.

I spent some hour trying to find a solution to improve this system in some way. Maybe this is not new, but I think it's worth to describe my findings.

Terminology. Given a comment C, we call every reply to this comment a child. If C is itself a reply to a comment R, we can say that R is the parent of C. A comment without parent (at top level) is called a root comment.

In the original system, threading is done this way:



B is child of A, so we move on the right of a given amount, and so on.

I suggest that if B has one or zero childs the system will render it in this way (the arrow is an actual part of the proposal):



With just two comments this appears to be almost the same, but check what happens if we have a more complex graph:



will be turned into:



Spacing for comments at the same level and the background image of the 'reply' arrow makes it more clear to read.

The final change proposed is that the reply arrows (rendered in green) are clickable with the effect of highlighting the parent to check without too much efforts what's the parent of a comment in complex discussions.

Please if you have comments send them in the reddit thread.

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