Linking Notifications to the thread
It's very important that the link in the notification for a new reply to discussions take users to the discussion thread than just show them the new reply. Having to click the link to the discussion after seeing the new reply is an extra step that will kill my site as the people I'm trying to work with will not understand how to find the discussion and the people I'm trying to attract will be used to forums that show the new post in the discussion thread.
Can this be fixed?
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That would be easy, but like so many things it isn’t simple. 🥴
Consider a discussion with, say, 2000 replies. You can’t load them into the same page, so some type of paginate, infinite scroll or partrial preload has to be used. Notification may be about a 654th comment in that thread... so when you link to it inline we’d have to load it along with some of nearest context replies (Parent comment, childs, etc). Simply linking to the post isn’t effective because it’s hard to find the comment in question.
So, a separate page for each comment linking to the parent content is the most simple option, in fact used by Twitter and Facebook in many instances. Doing it in a considerably better wat would require something similar to what’s FB does - launch a mini ReactJS app object for each comment section (and there may be many of them on each page, like in Feeds) that can be manipulated extensively without significant performance burden. Current Ajax comments are not particularly good for this at scale.
We thought of this a while ago and the JOT program was in part inspired by this challenge. The new “live comments“ that we are working on will have direct in-page linking.