I think it would be great if comments were threaded, so you could reply
to an individual comment. Is this something that’s been discussed
before? I saw that someone made a user script
to add that functionality it although that doesn’t work for me. (I also
can’t imagine how it could be added via only front end JS in a user
script.) Does anyone know how difficult this would be to implement? I
was considering posting a bounty for it on the bountysource page
but thought I should get an idea what other people thought about it first.
I don’t think client side javascript can do that currently.
It would need to know the date of the parent of each comment (as in what that comment replied to) to render that tree correctly!
but server-side it might be easier than people think
from what I remember in Diaspora comments are stored as a list in the top-level item.
if it still does that then perhaps if it stored the date of the immediate parent with each comment a new comment could just be inserted in the right place in the list (under what it replies to) when it is added/updated
(avoiding any need for additional complexity or tree-walking at view time)
just a thought
I can’t really try it myself right now
(until I fix that server or set up another and work out how to update rails and get my own instance back up!)
…but if comments are still stored the same way as I remember then I think getting it to do comments in threaded order could be as simple as that.