RE: Outline mode

[Nystul]

I like the outline mode here, but I do have a couple gripes with it. One problem, unless it has been fixed recently, was that extraordinarily long threads become impossible to follow (literally, you can't see all of the posted messages). That is a major drawback, especially since a threaded view would often be most useful for those complex political threads and such. On the bright side, by the time a thread gets that long, nobody has had anything useful to say on the subject for days or weeks. The other big gripe is that you can't title replies. It's not really a thread or outline without each post having a subject/title. Just getting the first few words of each post is often useless or deceiving.

One of the problems with giving people such different viewing options is that it affects posting behavior. There are several instances in the horror movie thread where people reply to multiple posts at once from different branches of the thread, or reply to a post that they are not actually replying to. These things are pretty common here amongst people using the linear view who probably don't realize how silly their posts look when they show up in the wrong place. That works both ways, as a person replying in threaded view may not think to quote the post they are replying to, and then when their post shows up on a completely different page in linear view people will have no idea where it is coming from.