Subthreads
Reading this thread on Alas, a Blog, gave me an idea. A comment was left disputing another comment that was tangential to the main topic of the post. This happens all the time, but this particular commenter apologized for the tangent (as doesn’t happen quite as often). And, I thought, this happens all the time. Why should people have to apologize for it? What’s wrong with blogs that the make it so tangential comments aren’t appropriate? That really sucks. But there’s a solution.
Subthreads. Have the topic of the main post be handled normally, with comments following serially afterwards. On the comment submission form have a checkbox that says “make this comment a subthread”, and let the commenter enter a title for the subthread. Also have an admin tool to make a particular comment, and maybe some replies, a subthread. A subthread has its own reply-to link, perhaps its own comment submission form, and is colored differently and indented. Perhaps it’s hidden with javascript by default. It appears in the place where its first post would be in a normal comment thread, and all replies are grouped together, followed by the rest of the normal comments.
This would be halfway between hierarchical threading and serial threading, with room for user and moderator participation. I think it would avoid the worst features of both different threading models for comments. Yay me! Now I just need to implement a wordpress plugin for it.
