According to the announcement
nested replies have been released and can be enable by the site admins.
@mattdm @kevin Could you please check if we have the setting.
Can it be enabled per user? or per theme?
Upd: after reading the thread it seems it can be enabled per category. Can we try it in some corner of the forum and see how it behaves?
I missed this one but from reading the article this looks like a nice chance.
If we can enable it for an existing conversation it would be nice to flip the switch to see what it looks like and if it’ll have a place here.
I expect Kevin and @gwmngilfen see it here too, but usually its safest to place something like this as a ticket for site admins → Making sure you're not a bot!
Someone already did! Making sure you're not a bot!
I’ll comment there
So on a long thread, I’ll have to repeatedly scroll back through the whole thread to find out if there are new replies hidden in the middle somewhere? I don’t think I like this feature. I’d rather keep things simple and linear.
Also, I’m not sure if this would interoperate well with the existing WordPress → Discourse plugin that we are using for Fedora Magazine.
Ah, if individuals can opt-in to it on their own, that is different. I’ll just leave it off.
I don’t think that it should ever be applied to the entire forum.
But I’d like to test it on a couple of not super important threads, to see if it makes sense for some specific types of discussions.
It is a switch which can be enabled on and off easily per topic, so it should be relatively easy to do a non-destructive test of it.
Maybe we can enable it in the mod area as first step to find out how it looks and behaves, and then from there see how to go ahead and what to do with it (and if and where it might fit). The mod area might be a safe place to test stuff like that.
I asked Greg to look into this… but from a quick reading: no.
It can only be enabled (by admins) on categories, and when they do,
everyone gets it, there’s no per user settings. ;(
But that was a quick glance, perhaps Greg will see more next week.
So, I double checked and as I understood: you can switch nested replies per category or per topic, but not per user.
It is an officially available non-destructive feature.
So I switched the nested replies on here for this topic for the experiment.
CC @gwmngilfen
I think that people do indeed reply differently in the threads which are nested and in which the conversation is continuous.
So the logic of the setting applied to the topic, rather than configured per user makes sense to me.
I think that it could be a possible compromise to enable nested replies mode to Change Discussions while keeping the continuous flow for the rest of the site.
I’m not sure if that is super critical: most people using the discourse interface seem to have not determined this to be critical.
Yet, if it remains disabled, it doesn’t change the possibility to thread emails in, e.g., thunderbird.
Those who expressed the need for threading seem to be those working in email clients, no?
However, I don’t exclude that it will take some time to create a common culture of engineers favoring discourse (using it like other discourse users) and engineers favoring mailing list threading like communications: some will cause flat but many threads, which might confuse others in their email client.
On the other hand, this could be enabled solely in the “engineering” category if we had one?
Supplement: this post might look a little off topic to some previous posts, as I posted before I saw I had a restricted view not showing all previous posts 
I think this is on topic here.
And also good for testing.
I think the issue with email vs webui integration is not just in how well things are connected through the metadata (correct Reply-To: headers and such), but also that people write their answers differently, depending when they reply to a thread or to a continuous flow.
So when email users mostly read things in threads, and webui users mostly reply into a flow, they don’t have the same context and this makes replies from one side look weird for the other.
So the threaded view makes the webui look more like a typical mail client view. And forces a person using a webui to reply in the same style - do not reply to multiple people at once in the same post, for example.
Yeah thats about what I meant. So 100% here.
So having a category for engineering (and maybe move change proposals there as sub category) might make sense to foster a common / compatible experience.
I think for me, being used to traditional discourse, this feels strange in the first moment, but I think it’s a matter of minutes to get the overview about these discourse thread view. I think it would be acceptable for those engineers preferring discourse and already using it. And others from discourse should be able to somehow get it too I think. The thread structure is more explicit than traditional discourse view, but practically it’s not new that people can respond to comments older than the most recent one. For mailing list users, it might be acceptable too (with some luck:).
Your concern about how to find new replies in a long nested thread bothers me now..
You can sort for new subthreads being at the top, but it is not exactly a solution.
There is also a “New replies” button appearing when there are new comments. We need to test it on a larger scale to see how it works.
I’m seeing a strange view too. If I scroll back far enough (which I don’t normally care to do), I can see that there is a 16m old reply in the middle of two 23d old replies. I guess it is a good thing that I scrolled way up there and spotted that! 
Yeah that’s the threading. It would be the same in mailing lists.
For mailing list users, the confusion is vice versa: replies to an early comment will be at the end at a normal discourse thread, which looks like comment 10 (that responds to comment 3) is responding to comment 9.
The advantage of default discourse is that it feels more intuitive for people not yet used to anything (so who have no preference yet). But the disadvantage is indeed that the normal discourse look also leads to posts getting lost in discussions with many posts (because people have to read everything or start at the end). This encourages / provokes repetition and re-post.
I think for an engineering category, the threaded thing could be an acceptable compromise, and actually, even for change proposals: The disadvantage I just mentioned indeed was a big origin of stress during my last change proposal.
Normally I click on the little timestamp from the homepage to go to the end of the topic:
On non-threaded topics that’s a link to the last reply, but on threaded topics it’s just a link to the whole topic. I guess “how could it not be?” but it makes me scratch my head about how to easily see latest replies.
This is pretty cool.
Now if we could just get discourse to include what you are replying to by default and allow you to bottom reply according to our email cultural reply norms…
Email users reading this topic, even though it’s now threaded in the web-ui, will still not like the fact that I replied to this bare without a quoted reply in the body. User of the web-ui see the threaded context I’m replying to.. and users of something like the hyperkitty web-ui for mailinglist probably see the context… but email client users probably do not.
All of that is to say there is still going to be cultural drift across the mediums.
-jef"could be worse…i could be top replying"spaleta
