I have always wanted to have feature here to fold comments. Let me explain what I mean with that.
There could be a “fold“ link between “link“ and “reply“ links for each comment that would hide children of that comment (sub-comments). Clicking again on that link (automatically renamed to “unfold“) would show children and get everything for that comment to original state, of course.
The reason I would like to have this feature is pretty simple — sometimes I don’t care about particular comments and children comments. I dislike to scroll through them to get to the next comment on the same level that may or may not be interesting to me. This problem gets even more painful when there are 20+ children comments. Even worse, sometimes one can get lost.
What do you think about this? Would you approve it if I’d code it and create a pull request?
Reddit supports comment folding via a plus sign next to each comment. I personally don’t think Lobsters needs comment folding yet. Very few of the stories on the front page have more than ten comments.
I can’t speak for @jcs, but I would guess that his answer will be ‘no,’ based off his response to a different issue here: https://github.com/jcs/lobsters/pull/20#issuecomment-11162517
If this feature doesn’t get built into the site, you could probably implement it as a GreaseMonkey user script by modifying the script Hacker News collapsible comments. You would mainly have to edit the jQuery element selectors and the code that finds comment elements to hide/show. The comment-finding would become a lot simpler, because Lobsters’s nested comments are actually in nested DOM elements.