On August 14th, 2024, we deployed an option in Discussions that allows you to disallow threaded replies. This feature was previously available in the legacy Discussions but was missing in the redesigned version. As a result, some of you may have noticed discrepancies with the new setting checked or not on your existing discussions. I would like to take this opportunity to clarify the situation.
Until now, in the database, we stored all new Discussions with the same property as we did for legacy discussions which were not threaded. Due to this, we could not distinguish whether a discussion had been created in the legacy Discussions with threaded replies disabled or if it had been created in the Discussions where threads had not yet been added. With the introduction of this feature, we needed to check the Disallow Threaded Replies setting for some of the Discussions.
At the time of the change, three scenarios were possible:
- If an existing discussion was explicitly set to threaded, the Disallow Threaded Replies setting remained unchecked. This indicates that the discussion was clearly created using the legacy Discussions with threading allowed.
- If an existing discussion was not set to threaded, but contained threads, the Disallow Threaded Replies setting also remained unchecked and we converted the underlying . This scenario indicates that the discussion was created using the Discussions and students had already added threaded replies.
- If an existing discussion was not explicitly set to threaded and did not contain threads, the Disallow Threaded Replies setting was set to checked, regardless if it was a new discussion or not, since this scenario could mean the discussion was either created in legacy Discussions with threading disabled or in Discussions without any threads.
This means, if you created a discussion recently and intended to allow threaded replies but did not have any threaded responses yet, this change would have set the setting to disallow threaded replies. To allow threaded replies again you can uncheck the Disallow Threaded Replies option when editing your discussion. We apologize if this change created any additional work.
Moving forward, all newly created discussions will respect the Disallow Threaded Replies setting. If the setting is unchecked, the discussion will be threaded, while if the setting is checked, the discussion will be not threaded. Additionally, if a discussion is published and contains at least one threaded reply, the Disallow Threaded Replies setting will become locked and cannot be changed.
Should you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to your CSM or Support.
