Viewing comments in chronological order

[qilin]

Threaded comments are great, but sometimes you might want to be able to view comments on a post in a flat, chronological order. To do this, you can use URL parameters.

In general, URL parameters are constructed by placing a ? at the end of the main URL and adding each name=value pair afterwards, separated by &.

Take the lastest news post, for instance. To view its comments in chronological order, add ?view=flat to the end of the page URL:

http://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/4351.html?view=flat

Or, let's say you were viewing the post in style=mine and so you already had one url parameter:

http://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/4351.html?style=mine

To add the view=flat parameter to this URL, you want to add &view=flat at the end instead:

http://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/4351.html?style=mine&view=flat

This URL parameter works on LJ, too! The only caveat is that view=flat depends on S2 styling and won't work with posts in S1. When this happens, add the fallback=s2 parameter:

http://user.livejournal.com/123.html?view=flat&fallback=s2

Because Dreamwidth doesn't have S1 styles anymore, you don't have to worry about that here.

Comments

[ladyoflisquill]

Thanks for this. It'll come in very handy.

Is ther a way to expand the comment while keeping them in their own comment tree so that I can still see who is replying to who?

[qilin]

Unfortunately, no, but what you can do for a given comment you want the context of is click the "Parent" link on the comment. This will take you to the parent of that comment, as well as show that comment, any replies it has, and all other reply comments below the parent comment. I am hoping at some point we add a "Root" link to comments, as well, that will take you to the start of a comment thread.