Subject: Another Forum Question

2/11/2010

Kent Barclay
Associate Dean of Academic Technology
Wax Academic Center- AC015
Endicott College
376 Hale St.
Beverly, MA 01915
978-232-2282
kbarclay@endicott.edu

Question to ListServ:

A faculty member contacted me and said that when she replies to a student on Forums, it places the reply at the bottom of the thread instead of right below the student’s posting that she’s replying to. Is that the usual way it works or is there a way to have the reply appear directly below the posting you’re replying to? I think that would make the most sense to me.

Responses from ListServ:

from Elias Sardonis <Elias.Sardonis@jenzabar.net>

• The default, multiple-message view of the a forum thread currently uses a chronological sorting, which explains the behavior your faculty member is seeing. Posts are displayed in the order they are made, without attempting to thread them into discussions. This is the preferred method for many users (for instance, it saves having to scroll through the entire discussion to see what’s new — new posts are always at the bottom), but it does have the drawback of taking posts “out of context” in some cases.

  There is an option to see the thread like she wants — the “Single Message View” of any thread uses a discussion-based ordering, and will show replies in the context of the post they are a reply to regardless of when they were posted. This may not be much help to your faculty member, since not everyone likes reading a thread in the “Single Message View.”

  The good news is that the new Forums portlet we are currently building gives everyone the option to use either chronological OR discussion-based ordering in EITHER view (single- or multiple-messages), so this issue will be solved with that upgrade — it’s in the 7.3 release which we are working on now.

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