I’m glad ya liked it. (And I hope you didn’t sweat it out too much waiting for me to repond to your comment. I was out of town at a wedding. :) ).

(Of course, you probably have no need for this post, since it’s hard to imagine any of your comments being ignored. Some love you and some hate you, but no one ignores you! ;) ).

Random J.,
As a relative newbie to the bloggernacle, and not having excessive computer chops, I’d probably not have gotten as involved if I had several strands to follow from a single thread, considering I also usually have multiple threads and multiple blogs (not all LDS-related). It’s a pain to scroll down a long list of comments though, so if there’s a way to increase navigability without option-overload, then us non-power-users would take to it.

All-
Please do not respond to this comment. There is nothing worth responding to here. Please move along.

There are a few people in my ward that I can talk to about deep subjects or even just speculate on the nature of God, they are “way-more-educated-than-me” and tolerant and patient with me.

But I find that the majority of the members of my ward are too busy surviving to have any curiosity or desire to explore feelings and issues. That is a lonely feeling at times. And yeah, Sunday School can be an ordeal of trying to keep my mouth shut in order not to offend the spirit or the other people in the room. Actually, I think me and Kristine in the same room would be too much for my ward. I take reading material and chew gum and try to be silent.

I don’t think that the software here is especially hard to navigate, I just think that it is holding the place back from its potential.

When you say, ” I don’t think T&S has any major problems yet, though.” do you mean that when it does have major problems it should change? When is the right time to tackle a scalability problem? When a few people have to get used to a slightly different interface or when lots of people have to? I guess the answer depends on how big of a problem you perceive it to be.

Even if they want to keep the limiting single thread structure, you could still have notifications of replies. Is it good to force everyone to watch the “most recent comments” bar like a hawk to see if there has been any reply in a thread that you posted to and then hope that it is a reply to your query? I think this is a problem and it is getting bigger as the comment volume grows. It used to be that the recent comments list covered the past day, now it might cover the past 20 minutes.

One final example of interface silliness, if I am reading a comment, is it helpful to wait till the end of the comment to know who is speaking? Isn’t that a strange way to have a conversation?

One positive is that all comments get read, more or less, by everyone. Threaded discussions allow side conversations to be ignored or lost to those who aren’t involved in it. While this can be a good thing in some circumstances (we’ve talked about implementing threading at M*), I’ve grown to like the way that I have to at least skim all of the comments on a thread here. I catch things I might otherwise miss.

I’ve left boards that had software I found hard to navigate before, so I understand your frustrations. I don’t think T&S has any major problems yet, though.