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
--
Matthew McNaney
Electronic Student Services
Appalachian State University
http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu
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