I have mixed feelings about this
I love it!
I like the idea!
By the way, contributions to this project are very much welcome. It doesnt even require knowledge of Rust programming, many things can be improved simply by editing the HTML templates.
Nice! Just tested this out, it works well. I had to use LEMMY_INTERNAL_HOST=https://lemmy.ml ROCKET_ADDRESS=0.0.0.0 cargo run
since I develop over a network.
The main thing that makes it difficult tho, is the lack of comment trees. phpBB is flat, like pretty much all these old forums. You might be able to provide the parent comment context, I think some of them use a quoted-style syntax, to at least show what the current comment is replying to, then you could keep everything flat.
Auto-generating quotes is one possibility, though I dont like that it implies rewriting the comment text. It could also be ugly in case there is already a quote. Or there could be a text field which links to the comment being responded to.
Another option would be a config option which disables nested comments entirely (both over federation and api). That means lemmyBB users wouldnt get to see all comments.
I wouldn't normally recommend borrowing things from 4chan, but: their posts automatically populate the footer-area of comments with a list of links to direct replies. Each direct reply, in the reply's header area, will then contain a link to the comment it's replying to, and hovering over these links displays a preview of said comment. The text of these links also displays the ID # of the post or comment being referred to.
Yes thats exactly what i meant, though probably without the hover functionality.
In lemmy-ui, I have to build the tree from the flat comments manually. You could do the same, or create a "2-level" one which has the comment, and its optional parent. Then you could check for the parent in the handlebars template and do a quote-style thing.
I wouldn't recommend actually inserting quoted comment text for comment replies: its a problem of displaying context only.
Displaying comments in nested form would look very bad, i dont want to do that.
Another problem is that phpBB forums are always organized into hierarchical categories (example). To make it work properly, such categorization will have to be added to Lemmy (optional, could be disabled for instances that use lemmy-ui).
I just mean only displaying the parent comment ( if one exists ) in a quote, it would still be flat. Example:
Thats a possibility, but it would get very verbose in case of a discussion with long comments. And then there would be cases like a user manually quoting something (so the same text might be quoted twice in a row), or having to exclude the automatic quote when the responded comment comes right before the current one.
I think this solution is preferable.
tried it out, it's mind-boggling
Reject Reddernity
Embrace BBition
Lemmy
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