Website Comments - Reply Feature Please!

We've done a couple reply mods to it before but we've never had two clients agree on what "reply" should look like and how it works.

The issues are around: nesting: needs to have a visual design for an unknown limit of nesting, display: needs to not go off the right hand side of the screen.  Or if we only allow one level of nesting then it's where to put the comments (under the parent), and how to do paging (do we show the parent on subsequent pages), and where to link people who are "subscribed" to a thread (email updates) when there's a new post (do we link them to the end of the thread, or to the middle under the parent comment).

Interestingly enough, some people are actually very "anti-nesting", there's a lot of discussion about it on the internet as it relates to messages boards.  For our forums we decided to go with a flat layout.

But back to the comments plugin, we've even done custom mods where people can "reply" to email notifications to a comment and then have that reply be added as a comment, and then we get to deal with stripping off email signatures and dealing with vacation bounce messages and spam, all getting auto posted as comments, etc.

It's not like we can't sort it all out, but the above is why you'll see a lot of our plugins are simple.  We're trying to follow the Apple model of simple and very well designed, focused on most common use cases that are going to support the largest number of users.

That said, if you have a client who has the budget for some more customized, we might have some code around that we could build off of.

Cheers!