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Ning To Jamroom
Brian -
A note about threaded comments - and this is something Ning-y.
But first, a digression as I mentioned above ...
There is no fundamental difference, from a data structures perspective, between forum posts, blog posts, memos, private notes, etc. You can easily have a superset of all the db fields and change the context in which any object is displayed. Photos, too. (And email while we're at it.)
The semantic difference between a blog post and a forum post is that when I post in a Forum I am asking a question for which I am looking for answers. When I post a blog I am telling a story and I am less interested in getting responses.
Forum discussions tend to generate a lot of replies to replies, hence nesting is a good idea -- you can see the branch point. From a UI/UX perspective, you should be able to expand/collapse a set of nested replies if the topic devolves or evolves in a direction that's uninteresting.
On the other hand, in a blog, replies tend to be to the post, not to other replies. This is not universal, of course, but it is one way of differentiating between Forums and Blogs.
For my .02, I would like the display/sort order in Forums to be strictly in order. The first response is displayed first. You can invert this, but that brings in the question of sort orders within nested replies, which can get very gnarly very quickly. So - I'd just punt and only offer strictly ordered presentation.
In a blog, I would permanently disable threading and give the administrator the option for the default sort order and then give the visitor the option to change the sort order. There's an icon for this in Images/Galleries.
OTHERWISE, there's no functional/data difference between Galleries and Blogs. And, if that's the case, I want the ability to re-parent blog posts into forum discussions (and vice versa) (and from site forums into Group forums) because a lot of users do not know the difference between posts and blogs and post in "the wrong place."
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