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Having things as they are is more natural; real conversations evolve and wander. Also sometimes you need to reply to a reply to correct it for example.
Steve
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The Osmosian Order wrote: discourage the wandering, off-topic posts so common in the forums,
Hey. That is one of the best bits of the CP community, how one post can spark off ideas in all different directions. That's how conversations work. The reason the CP community has been so succesfull is because of the conversational style of the forums.
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How about YOU start by not diverting normal questions with talk of Plain English this and Osmosicult that.
Don't make me link you to specific occurances - you know darn well where YOU have taken a simple question totally OT with your responses.
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Group discussions are hierachical, meandering, mutating things. They aren't relational objects. Even a formal business discussion will spliter into different branches.
The forums are designed to reflect the social aspect of a community and not try and represent a theoretical model based on schemas.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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The Osmosian Order wrote: re you seriously arguing that a history of the Osmosian Order's parent company, or a discussion of Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural principles BELONG under a heading where the word "font" is the only noun?
You have a point there. However, it is certainly possible and not altogether unheard of for users to either change the subject line on subthreads, or begin a new thread (with hyperlinks between it and the originating) when a discussion goes off-topic.
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Real discussions splinter, fork and evolve. For example person “a” poses a specific question to which person “b” replies. Person “b” answers the question but makes a serious mistake in some area unrelated to the original question. The logical course of action if for person “c” to reply to person “b” and correct the mistake. This also provides context. While I agree that if a thread wanders too far from it’s origin for too long it’s less than ideal I feel your “solution” is worse then the problem. No offense intended, but I sometimes wonder if you’re determined to address every problem with a radical solution.
Steve
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You brought that response on yourself after the way you've behaved on this site. I have zero sympathy.
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What's so bad about wandering off threads?
We are a big screwed up dysfunctional psychotic happy family - some more screwed up, others more happy, but everybody's psychotic joint venture definition of CP
Linkify! || Fold With Us! || sighist
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But doesn't the same happen with linear boards? You put your reply in OT - totalyl cool, and it gets lost.
What the hirarchy makes easier is to spawn a sub-conversation from there. On linear boards, you often find messages with entangled sub-threads. that's awful to read.
We are a big screwed up dysfunctional psychotic happy family - some more screwed up, others more happy, but everybody's psychotic joint venture definition of CP
Linkify! || Fold With Us! || sighist
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The database is already, essentially, in this form. Searching and displaying in flat form is easy, but then you get a completely flat heirachy that doesn't give any indication of the flow, evolution and branching of discussions.
The point of the threaded form is to graphically illustrate the ebb and flow of conversations. We did this on purpose. Everyone has flat heirachical boards but at CodeProject we are more interested in the conversaton than the answer because it's the discussion the illustrates more about the question than the straight answer. You saw this very clearly in the discussions on adding colours to names.
Organising and displaying messages, threads and topics in a way that makes perfect sense and is intuitive and easy to use is really easy. Extending it so it makes perfect sense and is intuitive and easy to use for everyone else is the tricky bit. Saying "the boards should be like this or that" isn't helpful. More useful is "it would be nice if I could view the discussions in this form". Then we can get somewhere.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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The Osmosian Order wrote: using a hierarchical structure to model something that isn't really hierarc
It's perfectly hierarchical: the parent makes a statement and its children are replies to that statement. Siblings are all replies to the same query.
Steve
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The Osmosian Order wrote: If "siblings" are all replies to the same query
They do, their shared parent.
The Osmosian Order wrote: only because that's where it was put, not because it logically belongs there
Any system ultimately relies on the poster posting it at the "correct" location. Unless you have a human editor it's always possible for someone to go off topic.
Steve
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The Osmosian Order wrote: Under which, I thought we agreed earlier, they may or may not belong
It is impossible to ensure that something can't be placed in the wrong location. Making it possible and easy to put it in the correct location is the only sensible option.
Steve
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I hardly answer the original poster.  And it seems I'm gonna carry on with it 
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I really like the hierarchical format of the CP forums - it seems so logical to me;
- if you have something to say to the original poster, reply to the thread-starting post
- if you have something to say to someone else's reply, reply to them.
It's that simple. Branching discussions should be encouraged, and not necessarily limited to the original topic (althout marking your subject "OT" for off-topic is good netiquette if you remember to).
"For fifty bucks I'd put my face in their soup and blow." - George Costanza ~ Web SQL Utility - asp.net app to query Access, SQL server, MySQL. Stores history, favourites.
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The Osmosian Order wrote: admitting ... that it doesn't belong
Depends how you look at it. To me it's just admitting that it's not 100% relevant. But the fact is you're saying it in response to something someone's said. So either post it OT, or don't post it, or post a brand new thread. But posting a whole new thread for something minor is totally pointless IMO.
The only minor complaint I have about the forum style is that you can't always easily see which post another post is replying to.
Oh and the fact that you have to expand each post (I don't believe Shog's expand-all script works with Thread-view) 
"For fifty bucks I'd put my face in their soup and blow." - George Costanza ~ Web SQL Utility - asp.net app to query Access, SQL server, MySQL. Stores history, favourites.
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The Osmosian Order wrote: who answered whom
...which is often of critically important, as it sets the context of the new comment, and doesn't rely on quoting all or parts of the original message (or looking up the message that was replied to).
The Osmosian Order wrote: our "relational" solution
OK, having read your post a couple of times, it appears as if you want to represent the discussion as a series of messages from one person to another - like email? The term "mailing-list" comes to mind - which is not what a forum should be like IMHO. Your advanced filtering idea is a cool.
However we're still arguing discussing in a "half-vacuum" since I'm currently *using* the existing solution, as opposed to just having *read* a summary of your idea. You mention that it would be trivial to implement. Why don't you have a stab at it? Post it on this site as an article. That's what I plan to do with my user-interface concept for a hierarchical forum (yes I'm really set on the "branching" concept). Basically my inspiration was CP & IMDB forums*, combined with a join-post-to-parent concept I came up with a while ago.
* who BTW let you toggle between nested (hierarchical) and flat view.
"For fifty bucks I'd put my face in their soup and blow." - George Costanza ~ Web SQL Utility - asp.net app to query Access, SQL server, MySQL. Stores history, favourites.
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Your concept doesn't automatically show you what post the currently viewing post was replying to. There's your deficiency. OK so maybe you have a plan on how to implement that capability. And now there's your "feature creep". So as you can see the same can be said about both approaches. But as far as I'm concerned neither of us are right, or wrong. Your solution might be more usable to type A people (e.g. DB admins), and mine might be more usable to type B people (e.g. developers). And maybe a third solution (the traditional flat-style forum) might be the most usable to the widest audience. But until you or I or someone else sets up a usability testing lab, and gathers all the results from real people using the actual solutions, we're just theorising about which concept is "better". I still prefer hierarchical forums, and always have.
"For fifty bucks I'd put my face in their soup and blow." - George Costanza ~ Web SQL Utility - asp.net app to query Access, SQL server, MySQL. Stores history, favourites.
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The Osmosian Order wrote: "TO" column
Yep, noticed that. Shows you the person you replied to. How does that answer my question?
The Osmosian Order wrote: recommended "complete sentence" format of all replies
OK so now you want to impose rules on the users because the software is lacking. (Actually this is the first I read of any reply-recommendation - I might be jumping to conclusions).
The Osmosian Order wrote: Occam's Razor
Don't see how that relates to software design. He recommends simple explanations over complex ones - I doubt very much that he was recomending omission of necessary features from software. With user interfaces a careful balance needs to be attained of simplicity vs. functionality.
The Osmosian Order wrote: Which really proves nothing but your own bias
I'm just comparing the usability of this forum compared to others I've used as well as my understanding of your concept. IMO your concept behaves like a mailing list, and not a forum.
The Osmosian Order wrote: hierarchical position of this post really isn't helping me, is it?
No, but it is helping everyone else who can clearly see that all these posts are a discussion dissecting the pros/cons of the hierarchical layout. Many people may have decided within the first few posts that they weren't interested in this "branch" and skipped ahead (even though we're still discussing the original topic of the thread - with the exact same subject line). Oh, but I'm sure your concept could handle that situation no problem with a few dropdown lists and textboxes (they'd just have to read your manual first telling them how intuitive it is and that they must be really stupid).
"For fifty bucks I'd put my face in their soup and blow." - George Costanza ~ Web SQL Utility - asp.net app to query Access, SQL server, MySQL. Stores history, favourites.
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The Osmosian Order wrote: Sorry for taking up your time.
Don't be sorry. Just because you haven't "converted" me doesn't mean we haven't had an interesting discussion. Who knows, 10 years from now your format could be the de facto forum format. At the end of the day the users will decide, not developers who believe in their ideas.
"For fifty bucks I'd put my face in their soup and blow." - George Costanza ~ Web SQL Utility - asp.net app to query Access, SQL server, MySQL. Stores history, favourites.
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This is a known issue but I appreciate the reminder. It will get attention.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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Is it at all possible for CP to offer an alternative text only style forum. I have complained often enough about my slow connection, I feel one of the drawbacks to CP is the amount of downloading required each time we refresh the page on the forums.
When I say text only, I mean a very simplistic topic page, with a link for replies, next.. etc. This would be great for us slow user and also help a little with your servers bandwidth.
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