# Threaded forum **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [March 25, 2007, 6:20am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/threaded-forum/90027 "2007-03-25T06:20:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![eleo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/ea5d25/32.png) [@eleo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/eleo)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2007, 6:20am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/threaded-forum/90027/1 "2007-03-25T06:20:47Z")
I’m having trouble sensibly designing a forum-type application with real threads. Whereas most forums have flat threads, my threads are actually “threaded” if you get what I mean, ie they are displayed in a fashion such as Post -Reply –Reply and so on. So my first attempt was to use acts\_as\_tree. Unfortunately I found it impossible to grab an entire thread with this. I could grab one post and its immediate children, but I couldn’t grab those children’s children without more queries for each depth level. Depending on the depth of a thread, massive amounts of queries could be run because of this. I later learned about acts\_as\_nested\_set, which seemed like a better solution. It has a method #all\_children which would effectively grab all the children - regardless of depth - of an object. I thought this would work, but acts\_as\_nested\_set seems underpowered. For example, with acts\_as\_tree I can do post.root and I will get the post at the very top of the tree. For some reason acts\_as\_nested\_set doesn’t have this, and I need this feature for a reason: i want to bump a thread when it has been replied to, but I can’t effectively change the bumped\_on timestamp of the root of the thread without being able to effectively find the root. My only other hope was acts\_as\_threaded, which is a plugin supposedly designed for threads. Unfortunately the site on which the plugin is located has been down for a few days and for some reason I doubt it will be back up. So I’m kind of out of ideas here. I mean the threaded forum paradigm is pretty old, so there must be a sensible design pattern for this. I just don’t know what it is. ---
**Author:** ![eleo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/ea5d25/32.png) [@eleo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/eleo)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2007, 8:24pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/threaded-forum/90027/2 "2007-03-25T20:24:18Z")
Eleo, I’m having the same issue. I’d love to see some OSS project that’s implemented threaded comments, but so far haven’t found anything. [Chowhound.com](http://Chowhound.com) which is Rails is the perfect example of what I’d like to do. here’s a mirror of acts\_as\_threaded: [http://marcusvorwaller.com/acts\_as\_threaded.zip](http://marcusvorwaller.com/acts_as_threaded.zip) -Marcus Eleo wrote: > I’m having trouble sensibly designing a forum-type application with real > threads. Whereas most forums have flat threads, my threads are actually > “threaded” if you get what I mean, ie they are displayed in a fashion > such as > > Post > -Reply > –Reply > > and so on. > > So my first attempt was to use acts\_as\_tree. Unfortunately I found it > impossible to grab an entire thread with this. I could grab one post > and its immediate children, but I couldn’t grab those children’s > children without more queries for each depth level. Depending on the > depth of a thread, massive amounts of queries could be run because of > this. > > I later learned about acts\_as\_nested\_set, which seemed like a better > solution. It has a method #all\_children which would effectively grab > all the children - regardless of depth - of an object. I thought this > would work, but acts\_as\_nested\_set seems underpowered. For example, > with acts\_as\_tree I can do post.root and I will get the post at the very > top of the tree. For some reason acts\_as\_nested\_set doesn’t have this, > and I need this feature for a reason: i want to bump a thread when it > has been replied to, but I can’t effectively change the bumped\_on > timestamp of the root of the thread without being able to effectively > find the root. > > My only other hope was acts\_as\_threaded, which is a plugin supposedly > designed for threads. Unfortunately the site on which the plugin is > located has been down for a few days and for some reason I doubt it will > be back up. > > So I’m kind of out of ideas here. I mean the threaded forum paradigm is > pretty old, so there must be a sensible design pattern for this. I just > don’t know what it is. ---
**Author:** ![eleo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/ea5d25/32.png) [@eleo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/eleo)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2007, 8:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/threaded-forum/90027/3 "2007-03-25T20:39:58Z")
Thanks for the acts\_as\_threaded mirror. Last night I discovered “better nested set” which adds useful functions to acts\_as\_nested\_set. For example you can do object.root and so on. I have yet to test it out, though. ---
**Author:** ![eleo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/ea5d25/32.png) [@eleo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/eleo)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2007, 8:52pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/threaded-forum/90027/4 "2007-03-25T20:52:08Z")
Eleo wrote: > Googlable but I should have left a link out of courtesy: > > [http://opensource.symetrie.com/trac/better\_nested\_set/](http://opensource.symetrie.com/trac/better_nested_set/) > > And yeah, the example you provided is basically -exactly- what I’m > trying to achieve, right down to the AJAX comment box appearing > underneath the post one is trying to reply to. Chowhound is also googlable but it’s by PJ Hyett and Chris W. who have one of the (IMHO) best Rails blogs out there. Here’s a particularly useful post: > **[Me and uFormats — err.the\_blog](http://errtheblog.com/post/35)** > > Err the Blog: Ruby and Rails from the front. ---
**Author:** ![eleo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/ea5d25/32.png) [@eleo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/eleo)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2007, 8:47pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/threaded-forum/90027/5 "2007-03-25T20:47:33Z")
Googlable but I should have left a link out of courtesy: [http://opensource.symetrie.com/trac/better\_nested\_set/](http://opensource.symetrie.com/trac/better_nested_set/) And yeah, the example you provided is basically -exactly- what I’m trying to achieve, right down to the AJAX comment box appearing underneath the post one is trying to reply to. ---
**Author:** ![eleo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/ea5d25/32.png) [@eleo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/eleo)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2007, 10:18pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/threaded-forum/90027/6 "2007-03-25T22:18:09Z")
I’m wondering, if you have acts\_as\_threaded, how come you’re still unable to implement threaded comments? Is the plugin inadequate?