SPDCA: There's an article I happened to come across (www.joelonsoftware.com) in some of my research for this, stating the author's disdain for forums that adopt "threading" rather than "flat" displays for forum interfaces:

"Something interesting happens sociologically when you don't have threading: the conversation is forced along one train of thought. People feel like they can respond to the original inquiry, or they can respond to the last post, but if they want to nitpick about the third post and there are already twenty more posts after that, it's just too late." Joel Spolsky (www.joelonsoftware.com), Jan 2001

The most compelling implication of what Spolsky says is that flat forums often reduce a topic such that it is more "conversational," rather than simply passing messages and storing them in a message tree. Users are compelled to hold a conversation, based on either the original thing brought up, or the last thing said about it, and less so the in-between.

(shrugs) I don't know. I've been on a few forums. And nothing about them is conversational. Forums are a unique form of communication, at once static and dynamic, with topical direction and dimension changing regardless of whatever convention users happen to uphold. Reading without threading, to me, is like reading a book written by twenty authors, none of whom proofread or try to maintain any sense of conversational narrative. It is screaming at the Internet, and lengthening a wall of text.

The reason I'm looking at this at all is I'm feeling a little outnumbered. The majority of the popular forum software out there on the Internet, either open source or commercial products, are all predominantly "flat." In addition to that, they have fairly unsophisticated viewing history mechanisms. I've been trying to bring up my boundary algorithm on their developer forums, only to find that people ask why I would come up with a system like that in the first place (the answer being: viewing in threads means that I have to be accurate, whereas they can be lazy with less of a detriment to user experience). Once threading comes up, they attack my choice of threaded display, and discard my boundary idea as unnecessary (as they never really plan on supporting threads).

I thought for a while that I was being ignored because my idea was too complicated (to the point where I was toying around with making an infographic about it), but I don't think that's the case. It's simply that they have a system that already works, it's too stupid to fail, and changing it would be catastrophic in terms of compatibility.

A question: For those members of idkfa v2 and v3, in your opinion, compared to other similar mechanisms (Facebook comments/posts, Email clients/listservs, etc.), do you find that idkfa's threading makes it harder to have a conversation? Is it because you're replying to one person at a time? Or that you can't easily see a single point of activity in a conversation? Other reasons?

I was considering what it would take to implement a "flat" display mechanism for idkfa. Technically difficult... but not impossible, I don't think. It would definitely put "flat" users at a disadvantage, though, as it would be like trying to see a cube on a 2D surface. You wouldn't see the shape of the conversation, only a single line of posts, with people's replies appearing randomly, and likely without context, at the end of the line. It might have to be that a thread is chosen, at its creation, on whether the creator wants it to be flat or threaded. Hmm.