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I'm building an imageboard framework and have decided to allow posts to have replies similar to Reddit or Hacker News. A common problem I face is that I want to jump to the next parent reply when another reply has too many child replies. To illustrate:
Witty comment.
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
....Several dozen more
Next Witty comment.
What would be a good design choice to jump to the next parent?
I would recommend providing a feature at the base of each parent comment which could collapse all the the child comments or expand it as needed. This way the user can quickly collapse the child comments and move on the the next one.
However this would work well if the user knows he is not going to read through say all the 2400 child comments. However if he does want to move to the next parent comment while reading through the child comments,i suggest a feature at the child comment level like this :
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
where the next comment link (highlighted in red) would take them to the next comment (I took the idea from reddit which already has permalink and parent)
I would consider implementation a reputation system (something along the lines of e.g. Reddit) that sorts the posts on votes given, with the highest rated witty comments at the top.
Then, to avoid noise when there are a lot of replies for a witty comment, I'd hide all the replies for a witty comment that has not been voted high enough (e.g. only show the top 5 voted replies for witty comment X). Basically something along the same lines of what Stackexchange does. ;)
