Plea to Drakon

[Dave Hicks]

(05-12-2014 07:29 AM)Thomas Radtke Wrote:  

(05-12-2014 05:50 AM)walter b Wrote:  In "linear mode", AFAICS, each new post is displayed as if it was a response to post #1 anyway; and sorting is simply as posts come in. So what's the benefit of sporting two buttons, <Quote> and <New Reply> here?

Ease of use for linear mode users:

And general familiarity. I just browsed around a bunch of forums I visit now and then and they all had the New Reply buttons. Many of these forums had no threaded mode that I could find. Of the ones that did have a threaded mode, that mode varied quite a bit from forum to forum and some of those did drop the new reply in threaded mode.

Thus, I suspect you could make a successful argument to convince the myBB developers to drop it from the threaded mode, but I think it would be much harder to convince them to drop it from the linear/standard mode. I don't think I would be fond of simply dropping the button in all modes, but as part of a well thought-out redesign of the linear UI, it might be OK. Any time I change anything here, it annoys some people, and I use the big buttons myself all the time. Honestly it had never occurred to me that in some forums where I do that, it might make less sense to some people who use a different viewing mode from the default mode.

Another forum I visit used to have a "New Thread" button right next to the "Post Reply" button. I'm sure the forum admin thought that was clever and efficient, but the forum ended up getting threads that made no sense because people thought they were making short replies and had no idea how they created separate threads. Now that forum looks like other forums with only big "Post Reply" buttons at the top and bottom.

This time I pressed the quote button which could seem strange in the threaded mode since it quotes Thomas' post but is also really a reply to Walter/all. But in linear mode - which is what I'm used to using just about everywhere these days, I think it works just fine. When linear (VB-style?) forums started taking over around 2000, I thought they were a step backwards too, but now I'm used to them and like them.