It seems the Wix forum manages text in three levels of hierarchy:
Posts (top-level).
Comments (belong to a post).
Replies (belong to a comment).
To create a comment on a post, you just type into the "Write a comment" box as shown below:
On the other hand, to create a reply to an existing comment, you first scroll to the comment you want to reply to, and click the "Reply" button:
After clicking on "Reply" then you enter your reply text in the "Write a reply" box.
Now, the problem is that if you write a new reply (not a new comment), it can be very difficult to find that new reply because it gets buried in the middle of the discussion.
Wix offers the option to show newest comments first, so you see them at the top of the list. This seems to be the (new?) default setting for the forum now.
But Wix seems to offer no option to show newest replies. This means that if there is an old comment in the middle of a thread, and someone makes a reply to that old comment, then the original comment (because it is old) stays in the middle of the comment list. Only if you manually search through all the comments can you find the existence of the newer reply.
I understand why Wix offers the different "comment" and "reply" functions (it's to allow a separate thread of discussion to occur around a single comment). But it would be nice if there were some way to see all newest replies to a post.
Is there any way to find new replies to a post?
Here's a specific example. @LarryDee made a post on April 27 here: https://www.theradioboard.org/forum/solid-state-radios/2-transistor-shortwave .
I made the following old comment on May 11, so it is in the middle of the comment list and difficult to find:
Then @LarryDee made a new reply to that comment, today, on July 2:
That reply is new (July 2), but the comment to which it belongs is old (May 11), so it appears in the middle of the comment list for the post (which was made long ago on April 27).
When you access the April 27 post at https://www.theradioboard.org/forum/solid-state-radios/2-transistor-shortwave , is there any way to show the above new reply at the top of the comment list?
The three-level hierarchy qrp-gaijin described (Post, Comment, Reply) is something I've seen on other forums where it is perhaps better suited than it is for TRB.
On NextDoor, for instance, many posts get 100 comments/replies, and the comments/replies there are so short that you can often see 15 or so on the screen at once. The Replies are visually "nested" by indenting them just below their parent Comments; this makes them easy to follow, and can be especially helpful for posts that get small contributions from many, many people.
In contrast, TRB posts more often get something like 10-20 comments/replies, and each of these tends to be longer and carry much more information. The possibility of seeing all of them on a single screen, nested into a visible outline, is pretty much gone -- and might not have added much value to these discussions anyway. As it is now, the three-level multithreading adds some confusion when you read through a post for the first time.
If Wix has a global switch for disabling the Reply feature on future posts (without losing any of the Replies on existing posts), I think that would improve readability and logical flow. It would become a two-level hierarchy with a single chronological order, much like the old TRB, and if you want your comment to make reference to another's, you could accomplish that just by pasting in a snippet of their text.
Of course, each of us could just refrain from using the Reply button, too. I have learned my lesson now after having littered Greg's post on variable caps.
Many thanks to Larry for setting this place up!
Casper