Threading and web based discussion systems
Sunday, September 7th, 2008I kind of grew up in the old BBS days, with subboards, message boards, or whatever you want to call them. I even ran a few…I miss my Apple ][gs.
Over time, I learned of UseNet and everything changed. Thousands of groups, hundreds of thousands of concurrent topics, millions of readers, and who knows how many responders. BBS is local, UseNet is global.
It didn’t take long for said changes to evolve creating the idea of a threaded discussion. Multiple people can respond concurrently, each addressing their own area of the previous message, but each can then respond again to another message, creating a tree like layout where separate subtopics can be discussed.
Might be better said by Wikipedia people:
A threaded discussion is an electronic discussion (such as one via e-mail, e-mail list, bulletin board, newsgroup, or Internet forum) in which the software aids the user by visually grouping messages. Messages are usually grouped visually in a hierarchy by topic. A set of messages grouped in this way is called a topic thread or simply “thread”. A discussion forum, e-mail client or news client is said to have “threaded topics” if it groups messages on the same topic together for easy reading in this manner. Moreover, threaded discussions typically allow users to reply to particular posting within a topic’s thread. As a result, there can be a hierarchy of discussions within the thread topic. Various types of software may allow this hierarchy to be displayed in what’s called Threaded Mode. (The alternative being Linear Mode, which typically shows all of the posts in date order, regardless of who may have specifically replied to whom.)
Yah, that sums it up quite nicely. Go go Wikipedians!
