On Wednesday, November 16, 2011 00:12:33 Adam D. Ruppe wrote: > bcs Wrote: > > You must have miss-spoke. I assume your intended to say organised and > > grouped instead of an insane interleaved view where the conversation's > > natural structure is mashed flat and destroyed. > > I've *never* had a conversation in real life where time branched out. > > The closest you can come in real life is if a group splinters, and instead > of a public forum, you have a bunch of private conversations that just > happen to take place in the same room.
Knowing the parent post of a particular post can be critical to understanding that post - especially when the parent post isn't quoted in the reply. Particularly with longer threads, I don't know how you could ever hope to follow them without having a properly threaded tree structure to the posts. That's one of the reasons that I always read posts in my local mail client rather than in my e-mail's web client. Even gmail - which has threading of a sort - is completely inadequate to dealing with complex threads. I don't really care all that much about what you do with your reader, since I'm not likely ever to use it, but I don' understand how anyone could reasonably track any of the longer threads without a properly hierarchical view of them. - Jonathan M Davis
