I 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!
So, in my quest to find the right discussion system for our internal needs, I reviewed a lot of different forum systems, all using PHP as the interpreted language, and of the 8 or 9 I reviewed and installed (concurrently), only 2 supported threaded discussions.
First was MyBB, pretty simple to set up and works as expected. The threading works, which is what I really cared about.
Second was Phorum, also pretty simple to set up and working as expected. It is also my favorite of the two because of its larger feature set, and better visualization of the threaded discussion.
Why do I care about this…that’s a little tougher to explain.
Internally, we need a system for discussion allowing multiple people to be involved in said discussion discussing separate points along the way. People will respond to different things creating these smaller discussions that are part of the overall larger picture.
Doing things in a linear (by date only) fashion doesn’t allow a complex being (like humans) to necessarily keep up after a while – the discussion will become fragmented and hard to follow.
Threading solves some of that because you, as a human, can read through, diverge off for a bit, then come back to the larger discussion at hand.
We have been using email for this for a long time and that does work (all of our mail clients, luckily, support threaded discussions, and not just subject based sorting) but creates a huge duplication of email across the enterprise. A single 2KB message becomes 28KB as I hit send (we have 14 people in the office), compound that with 8-10 replies and you start to see what I am trying to avoid: massive duplication of data where there isn’t a need for such.
I like threaded discussions, maybe I am weird.