Re: [Phpwebsite-developers] Comment View

[Wendall C. <wen...@83...>]

Matthew McNaney wrote:

>Greetings,
>
>A few weeks ago I started writing the Comments module. After talking
>with He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named (ok fine - Steven) we outlined the Threaded
>- Nested - Flat views for comments.
>
>Since flat view was the easiest, I started with it. It was actually
>pretty easy using the DBPager class. I can paginate and it only pulls
>the rows that are needed (read: speed / low overhead). After getting it
>working pretty well, I started looking at threaded and nested.
>
>The short of it is, I don't like them for a few reasons:
>
>1) Unlike flat view, you have to load ALL the comments in a thread at
>once. Even if you don't process them all, you have to load them. 
>
>2) "Ah", you say, "but you can limit them by where or count!" Not
>really. If I limit via the db by time, I only get the children comments
>not the parents. If I limit by count, then there are gaps between pages
>and most likely one thread with several children would dominate.
>
>3) As Mike Noyes suggested (and Steven and I debated), those views are
>harder to template.
>
>4) I hate nested/threaded with its smaller and smaller widths. Looks
>awful to me.
>
>I know Slashdot has the moderator points, but how many people really
>want to use that? It seems more of a bandaid for the problems that
>threaded/nested create.
>
>phpBB uses flat and it's kinda popular ;-) Am I thinking of just
>sticking with flat and offering filtering on time frame, user, and other
>stuff you guys can think of.
>
>Anyway, I wanted to check with the devs before taking this mindset 100%
>(I'm at 98% so far).
>
>Matt
>
>
>  
>
Flat is good. I also dislike nested in small spaces like the body area. 
It would be fine if the interface was designed for nested.

Wendall