Make replying easier

[Jordan Miller]

Hey team, 

I had several ideas...

1.) What would it look like if the entire quick reply form was moved from the bottom to directly underneath the Topic starter's post.

2.) Additionally, a quick reply form would appear when quoting to someone's comment. 

3.) Truncating replies.

I think it's pretty interesting how on Reddit, you can follow a chain of replies. Whereas in IPB, it's a long list of thread. I imagine for someone casually browsing they'd be overwhelmed with the amount of replies to sort through. I would love to explore options on how to display comments so that things are simplified.  

I'm not super fond of the idea of having to scroll all the way to the bottom of a topic to reply. 

 

I wonder if it would make things easier for users to reply.

Making things easier/more efficient = more engagement! 

Have any ideas to make replying easier? Any thoughts on how to lay comments out so there is more content in-view per scroll? I'm interested to hear what the community thinks.

[Rikki]

Nice suggestions. I don't think the concept of replying directly to a post works so neatly on forums (well, Invision Community in particular) because our conversations aren't threaded. Instead you quote one or more posts - but your reply is still part of a linear conversation.

That said, you're definitely right that having to go to the bottom of the page is a bit old fashioned and cumbersome. I think it could be made easier - for example, one idea would be to have a floating reply button or even reply box, available on a topic page at all times, so you can start working on your reply wherever you happen to be in the topic.

[Jordan Miller]

7 minutes ago, Rikki said:

floating reply button or even reply box, available on a topic page at all times, so you can start working on your reply wherever you happen to be in the topic.

Interesting! 

Not 100% sure how I feel about floating anything 😂 How can we make that even more simple? 

If there was a plugin to make conversations threaded, I would throw my money at it. That to me seems very interesting and would increase engagement! I'm not loving linear threads where it's pages and pages of replies when they could be simplified to be one or two pages. 🙂

Thanks for replying to my topic. @Rikki

[SC36DC]

1 hour ago, breatheheavy said:

I think it's pretty interesting how on Reddit, you can follow a chain of replies. Whereas in IPB, it's a long list of thread. I imagine for someone casually browsing they'd be overwhelmed with the amount of replies to sort through. I would love to explore options on how to display comments so that things are simplified.  

I was actually going to post about this same thing a while ago, this is similar to FB replies. I only want to use this sort of idea on one section of the forum, the 'Introduction' section (which I don't currently have, it's just a thread in a section)

But let's say someone joins the forum, a thread is auto generated to go into the 'Introduction' section, which will have their name first, so it can be sorted alphabetically if needed, but defaults sort by join date, so the title would be something like, 'breatheheavy - Welcome to IPB'. Then there could be custom auto generated content just saying 'Welcome breatheheavy to IPB. If you'd like, please share a little bit about yourself  ....." Then the person has the opportunity to leave a reply in that thread. But let's say others on the forum start leaving replies before he gets a chance to, those replies ONLY show under the 'breatheheavy' thread, and are even closed when looking at this section. So you basically only see a bunch of blocks/threads with each persons name. There would be a 'Read replies' link to click to expand all replies for the 'breatheheavy' thread. 

So now after 10 people leave a comment welcoming breatheheavy to the forum, breatheheavy finally leaves a comment sharing some details about himself. His post would be automatically placed directly underneath the first initial 'Welcome' thread with his name. Maybe slightly highlighted like the Q&A section where the most voted answer gets placed at the top and highlighted. 

So again, I would love to see replies implemented this way but for this custom section of the forum.

 

26 minutes ago, Rikki said:

to have a floating reply button or even reply box, available on a topic page at all times, so you can start working on your reply wherever you happen to be in the topic.

This is a great idea, love it. I do hope to see this added at some point.

 

Edited May 11, 2020 by SC36DC

[Jordan Miller]

1 hour ago, SC36DC said:

I was actually going to post about this same thing a while ago, this is similar to FB replies. I only want to use this sort of idea on one section of the forum, the 'Introduction' section (which I don't currently have, it's just a thread in a section)

But let's say someone joins the forum, a thread is auto generated to go into the 'Introduction' section, which will have their name first, so it can be sorted alphabetically if needed, but defaults sort by join date, so the title would be something like, 'breatheheavy - Welcome to IPB'. Then there could be custom auto generated content just saying 'Welcome breatheheavy to IPB. If you'd like, please share a little bit about yourself  ....." Then the person has the opportunity to leave a reply in that thread. But let's say others on the forum start leaving replies before he gets a chance to, those replies ONLY show under the 'breatheheavy' thread, and are even closed when looking at this section. So you basically only see a bunch of blocks/threads with each persons name. There would be a 'Read replies' link to click to expand all replies for the 'breatheheavy' thread. 

So now after 10 people leave a comment welcoming breatheheavy to the forum, breatheheavy finally leaves a comment sharing some details about himself. His post would be automatically placed directly underneath the first initial 'Welcome' thread with his name. Maybe slightly highlighted like the Q&A section where the most voted answer gets placed at the top and highlighted. 

So again, I would love to see replies implemented this way but for this custom section of the forum.

 

This is a great idea, love it. I do hope to see this added at some point.

 

Awesome idea! I had the Auto Welcome application creating a new topic each time someone registered, but the section was kind of a dead zone so I disabled that feature. I was using @Mike John's Auto Welcome app.

 

[SC36DC]

I'm also using Mike John's Auto Welcome app. Works great for what it does. I am still setting up a Help Guide section breaking down how to use features on the forum, once that's done, I will include a link for them to check out all the features. 😉

[Jordan Miller]

18 hours ago, SC36DC said:

I'm also using Mike John's Auto Welcome app. Works great for what it does. I am still setting up a Help Guide section breaking down how to use features on the forum, once that's done, I will include a link for them to check out all the features. 😉

Looking forward to seeing that!

Here's mine thus far: 

https://www.breatheheavy.com/exhale/index.php?/faq/

[Jordan Miller]

Anyone interested in circling back on this threaded reply idea? 😬

I love this concept because you can directly see someone's reply versus scrolling page to page to page. If we could see members' replies directly under the original comment that'd be 🔥 

It also means a lot more content could fit on a single page. 

Thoughts? 

[jackflash]

On 7/21/2020 at 3:44 PM, breatheheavy said:

Anyone interested in circling back on this threaded reply idea? 😬

I love this concept because you can directly see someone's reply versus scrolling page to page to page. If we could see members' replies directly under the original comment that'd be 🔥 

It also means a lot more content could fit on a single page. 

Thoughts? 

Like you look and feel of your site.  Is is powered by SuperGrid or SuperBlocks?

[JEFF MACK]

On 5/12/2020 at 2:13 PM, breatheheavy said:

Looking forward to seeing that!

Here's mine thus far: 

https://www.breatheheavy.com/exhale/index.php?/faq/

Holy Ads Batman.  16 ads on one page.  

[Eudemon]

I actually thought about reddit style replies, the app along is gonna be quite some work

[Jordan Miller]

On 7/23/2020 at 6:59 AM, jackflash said:

Like you look and feel of your site.  Is is powered by SuperGrid or SuperBlocks?

Appreciate that! The homepage is SuperTopics 🙏 

 

22 hours ago, Eudemon said:

I actually thought about reddit style replies, the app along is gonna be quite some work

Interesting. How much work we talking here? A total re-construct? 

I honestly think it'd be a GAME CHANGER for IPB if it exists 😁

[Eudemon]

16 minutes ago, breatheheavy said:

Interesting. How much work we talking here? A total re-construct? 

I honestly think it'd be a GAME CHANGER for IPB if it exists 😁

a lot, obviously at front the template layout change that support layered replies, updating quote and reply comment

behind the scene, also change to how contents are pulled, threads are paginated, but in reddit style you may have 1st page comment with replies in 88th page

this can be overcome by adding additional column that map to a comment id

post per page will need to change, as you now might have some pages with more comments than other (altho this can be restricted by validating total comments pulled before ouput but then since replies are display in layer this will impact uniformity of each page

at this point might as well just do infinite scroll of post, accommodating new list with ajax request

and then maybe voting comment up, that's another can of worm (logically with current database structure we have to sort all posts linked to a thread first for that, this would slow down db operation a bit depending size

these are just some stuff i come up in few seconds, sure there gonna be more

Edited July 24, 2020 by Eudemon

[Jordan Miller]

57 minutes ago, Eudemon said:

a lot, obviously at front the template layout change that support layered replies, updating quote and reply comment

behind the scene, also change to how contents are pulled, threads are paginated, but in reddit style you may have 1st page comment with replies in 88th page

this can be overcome by adding additional column that map to a comment id

post per page will need to change, as you now might have some pages with more comments than other (altho this can be restricted by validating total comments pulled before ouput but then since replies are display in layer this will impact uniformity of each page

at this point might as well just do infinite scroll of post, accommodating new list with ajax request

and then maybe voting comment up, that's another can of worm (logically with current database structure we have to sort all posts linked to a thread first for that, this would slow down db operation a bit depending size

these are just some stuff i come up in few seconds, sure there gonna be more

Love where your head's at! I also love the infinite scroll idea.

Perhaps Each comment gets 5 replies that are visible before the user is asked to "Expand" to see the rest? 

I think this kind of format would propel IPB to some really awesome new territory. 

The up vote comment thing is interesting because it exists if your forum is a "Question" type. I tried t and my forum community revolted lol so we disabled it. But I do like the idea of having that ability, too.