Replying to a specific post

Very new to WWF, and was just wondering how to reply to someone's post in the middle of a thread? I'm switching to WWF for our forums, but it's been my experience that sometimes posts can take on a life of their own and branch off in completely different direction. I'm ok with that. WWF seems to be constrained to a linear format. i.e.: New Topic, response 1, response 2, response3, etc. What if a person wanted to reply to what was said in response 1? On long threads, if all posts are appended to the end, things could get a bit confusing.

Thanks,
Mike



Edited by Mike Keeney

Yes, I saw the quote button, but replies are still posted to the end of the thread. If an active thread ends up with a hundred posts, and someone wants to respond to something in message 20, that response is going to be post #101.

Online chatting typically falls victim to this problem. Especially if there are several people present. Responses typically are out of sync with the current message.

The ColdFusion forum has a good method for handling this. They use a tree structure similar to MS Explorer. One advantage to their setup is that they have a hotlinked table of contents at the top of the thread. Users can click on a message that interests them and go right to it.

I hope no one thinks I'm complaining, because I'm not. I'm just interested in finding out if WWF has this kind of functionality, or if it is even possible.

Thanks,
Mike


Edited by Mike Keeney

There are different styles of forums on the market, there a flat view ones like this and there are threaded discussion forums.

This gives people a choice, if they like a flat view forum the people will install this software on their site, but if people like threaded discussion forums there are plenty of other forum software out there that are in this style.

If you want a threaded discussion forum then you would be better looking for this type of software, have a look on www.aspin.com for this type of forum.

testp wrote: Some other message boards offer a threaded view, where the replies are indented inside the topics that they reply to. But this forum only has this flat view. I personally prefer the flat view. In a threaded forum, when a message reaches 10+ levels of indentation the pages only get ugly and confusing. Besides, with the flat view you can reply to multiple messages with just one post, like so: Mike wrote: your message My reply to you. Mike wrote: your other message My next reply   and so on

 

HEY.. how did you get all the different quotes in there?  How would you get more then one box?  and how would you copy the text from other posts???   That is EXACTLY what I am looking for!!!