Nested comments?

Nested comments?

by Jenny Gray -
Number of replies: 4

I'm working out the functional requirements for a new Moodle module which will act as a way of allowing students to pretend they are in a physical design studio and comment on each other's work.  (And yes, I know there are other modules that do similar stuff - this is the short module description and I do have reasons why other modules aren't "quite" right it just doesn't matter for this thread).

I've shown the faculty team both the Comment API already in Moodle and a custom commenting feature in one of our other modules (oublog).  Neither of these currently offers threaded, or nested, conversation.

Personally I prefer the Comment API because its all there for me already, and the AJAX interface is nice.

So, I'm looking for a show of hands (or reasons why its a bad idea) if I were to offer to code threading into the comment API?

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In reply to Jenny Gray

Re: Nested comments?

by sam marshall -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

One other possible option is to offer a 'Reply' link which automatically inserts the user's name before your comment, but keep the actual comments flat. Like

@Jenny Gray: Yes I totally agree!

Or something smile

Just suggesting that since it's a lot simpler as you can do it without any database change.

--sam

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In reply to Jenny Gray

Re: Nested comments?

by ben reynolds -

Jenny,

Just commenting so I can continue to follow this. I'm interested in your module for some Visual Fluency courses we're running.

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Re: Nested comments?

by Derek Chirnside -

This crops up regularly for me, the questions of display something (maybe on the left) and comment/discuss on the same page (maybe on the right).  The problem with regular forum for this kind of things is that you click reply and loose the view of the thread.

The problem with the regular comments with what you propose could be space.  Although this may be fixable with the theme.

The only immediate thing I can think with core Moodle of is the blog.  But I cannot remember if we have threaded comments or not.

Out of the box thinking: could Frankies Facebook clone plugin help?

Could the chat also work in this way?

Or maybe code a new activity.  In the left put a display screen with the item for comment.  In the right choose a discussion thread from your course and display it??  This is just a new way to LOOK at a discussion thread.  I have no idea if the code underneath support this.  Not a good splution with NG possibly coming to replace core forum.

You'll see my bias here: a way in Moodle to talk about something that is always there to look at in very simple way.  I am a fan of marginalia: http://www.geof.net/code/annotation/demo/

-Derek

 

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In reply to Jenny Gray

Re: Nested comments?

by Aparup Banerjee -

I agree that the comment API is quiet lacking. It seems to be a straight thru chat at times reminding me of our devchat. Introducing threading would certainly help the Comment API. The situation described is similar to plugins DB having content along side the current 'Discussions'.

Although, I haven't looked much into mod_forum but i can imagine that the  threading machinery in it could be extracted with some difficulty into the Comment API to achieve this. This way we'd be able to port over the well used qualities of forum (wrt to conversation types) for re-use within other plugins.

This way Comment API could evolve into more of a conversation API for easier re-use in other pre-facilitated shared context areas and perhaps mod_forum would be more about facilitating needs within a whole forum.

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