Thanks, Jaffa, for perfectly explaining why I personally hate threaded view.

I think what people are saying is that they might be interested in the tangent thread where J replies to C, but not the one where K replies to H, and they don't wish to have to read both. Nor are they interested any more in L's comment to the overall thread.

To me, it's about how a conversation would actually happen in a real time conversation, where two or three topics branched off and I was trying to follow them all. Eventually, if one tangent strand became important enough, it would be scheduled for another meeting (Get its own dedicated thread) but in the meantime, people would be talking about a few different areas of the main topic. I guess that's partly because I don't have a problem following several strands of conversation at once - I can see that for some people it's a challenge. There's also the question of time/effort spent reading the material on a topic one is not interested/involved in.

I think there's merit to this request:

- For those who are new to the system, it'll be easier to follow the conversations.
- For those who are here on daily basis, it'll be easier to follow multiple conversations within a thread.
- For administration and general site upkeep, it'll be easier to identify forks (of spam or OOTness or of a seed that's worthy of its own thread) and act accordingly.

I've also seen forum packages (or plugins?) that enable selection of multiple view on reading threads:

- linear mode
- threaded mode
- hybrid

So everyone can set their own defaults and switch to whichever view is most suitable depending on what they're doing. Have your cake and eat it too...

Exhibit A: (click on 'option' button on the top-right-ish area)

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/ind...owtopic=166967

@ysss
The two extra viewing options, other than 'standard' on that site seem pretty useless. They aren't intuitive at all. Especially under the outline view with the collection of links to replies. How to know which to click if you have no idea what the content is?! And the 'linear+' I don't even understand what it does.

I would love to see the branching the way it s in the picture I provided in the beginning of the thread. It's an extremely clean and intuitive layout. You know exactly who's talking to whom. You know exactly what you're interested in reading, and it saves you a lot of time. What would be even cooler is if the branches were collapsible and the collapsing is remembered if you return to the thread. Saves you the scrolling through boring/useless stuff again.