Problem: In the big discussions in the Structured Discussions (Flow), the conversation turns into a wall of text. And it is not easy to understand who is talking to whom, since the answer to the last comment in the branch and the answer to the first message of the branch will be the last comment in the branch.
Who would benefit: Readers of discussions
Proposed solution: Store in the comment data about clicking on which "Reply" it was created. When you hover over the child comment, additionally show the author's nickname of the parent comment (when you click on it to scroll to the parent comment) and highlight the parent comment. e.g.
Just getting rid of the atrocious system of ‘structuring’ the Structured Discussions would help a lot more in solving issues with understanding the system. No other comment system does have an approach more complicated than this add-on (not an extension) on wiki engine. stjn[ru]15:42, 11 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I like this idea, and it is very common in other discussion systems as well, that there is an indicator of who you are replying to, or even allowing you to quote a particular fragment. I'd welcome such a change. Indentation is limited and people don't consider how that works on mobile viewports, so I do not consider indentation a complete solution to this problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:35, 15 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The first half of this wish seems to be T174371 (that was one of the Q1 goals; can't really tell what state that ticket is in though). Doing the recording bit ASAP seems common sense to me; it is impossible to backfill that so we are losing data every day it is not deployed. (The other half feels to me like an important thing but not particularly urgent compared to things like search support, human-readable page titles, proper history... ) --Tgr (talk) 04:43, 19 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, this is mostly done (I.e. it is storing the "reply-to" accurately in the database), and final fixes are being worked on. I'll archive this proposal (but leave your other proposal open) as it only relates to the backend changes. I'll ask the team to update those tasks for clarity. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 22:25, 20 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Quiddity (WMF): It's mostly about the frontend. I would like to see clearly the relationship between the post-original and the post-reply. In contrast, the task T167928 says only "is not displayed for now". --Sunpriat (talk) 00:38, 21 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Sunpriat: Sorry, I was unclear and incomplete. I meant: your other proposal, 2017 Community Wishlist Survey/Miscellaneous/Multilevel Structured Discussions, better encompasses any frontend changes (plus everyone (including the team) already wants to fix the current frontend output). It is not needed for anyone to vote on this, for something like this to be done - how exactly it gets changed, is a more complicated discussion than a single wishlist idea can resolve. I hope that helps clarify. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 01:07, 21 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
