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mdfahd
Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️
July 29, 2026

Moderate Threaded Replies in Customer Communities

  • July 29, 2026
  • 19 replies
  • 197 views

This article helps admins to enable and moderate threaded replies in Gainsight Customer Communities.

Overview

 

Threaded replies help community users to respond to a specific reply within a post. This creates structured levels of reply, keeping the conversations direct and consolidated. As an admin, you can enable threaded replies from Control.

The Destination view shows the community-facing thread as members see it. The Control view provides the full set of moderation tools and mirrors the destination layout, making it easier to cross-reference content while taking action.

Limitations:

 

  • Thread depth is capped at three levels (L1, L2, L3). Replying to an L3 reply posts the response as an L2 reply with an automatic @mention.
  • Trashing or marking a reply as spam applies only to that individual reply. Child replies (L2 and L3) are not removed automatically.
  • The sort order for L2 and L3 replies is fixed at oldest first and cannot be changed.
  • Turning off the Enable Threaded Replies toggle hides all nested replies from view. They are not deleted and become visible again when the toggle is turned back on.

 

Enable Threaded Replies From Control

 

For communities who require a clean structure and consolidated view of replies, threaded replies can be enabled from the Control.

To enable threaded replies:

  1. Log into Control.
  2. Navigate to Settings > Content and Replies. The Content and Replies page appears.
     
  3. Turn on the Enable threaded replies toggle. Threaded Replies is now active in Destination and Control.

IMPORTANT: When the threaded replies toggle is turned off, the nested replies are hidden in Destination. Replies are not deleted. Turning the toggle back on restores their visibility.

 

Moderate Replies in Control 

 

The Control provides the full set of moderation tools for topic replies. The layout mirrors the destination view, so content you identify in the destination is easy to locate in Control.

 

You can access any topic or a conversation from Control:

 

  1. Log in to Control.
  2. Navigate to Content > Overview. The Overview page appears.
  3. In the Search text field, enter the topic name to moderate. The Topic Moderation page appears.

The Topic Moderation page has the following sections:

 

  1. Original Topic Post: Displays the topic as posted by the community member, including the title, body text, and engagement options such as Like, Reply, and Share.
  2. Overview: Lists key metadata about the topic, including its type, creation date, section, category, view count, likes, and reply count.
  3. Details: Shows the editable properties of the topic, including the title, category, public tags, moderator tags, and labels.
  4. Write a reply: Provides a text field for the admin or community member to compose and submit a reply directly below the post.
  5. Pagination: Allows navigation across reply pages. Admins can jump to a specific page, move forward or backward, and control the number of rows displayed per page.
  6. Replies section: Lists all replies associated with the topic in the selected sort order. Nested replies appear indented under their parent reply, reflecting the thread structure.

Moderate a Reply

 

You can manage replies from the control in the Moderate Topic page. To moderate a reply:

  1. Click on the three-vertical dots menu.
     
  2. The following options are available for moderating a reply:
    • Edit: Click the pencil icon to edit a reply.
    • Highlight: Click the arrow icon to highlight a reply.
    • Pin: Click the Pin icon to pin a reply at the top of the list of replies.
    • Link: Click the Link icon to copy the link of the reply to share.​​​​​​​

In addition to the above actions, you can also do the following:

  • Promote a reply to a new topic
  • Send a message to the author of the reply
  • Send a moderation notice
  • Mark a reply as spam
  • Move a reply to a topic

Note: When a reply is promoted to a new topic, the child replies are preserved in the new topic.

 

Moderate Replies in Destination

 

You can also moderate the replies in Destination. To do this:

  1. Log into Destination.
  2. Click the three-vertical dots menu.
     
  3. The following options are available for moderating a reply:
    • ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Edit: Opens the reply in edit mode.
    • Mark as highlight: Highlights the reply in the thread.
    • Copy link: Copies the reply URL to the clipboard.
    • Quote: Inserts the reply as a quoted block in the reply editor.
    • Report: Flags the reply for a community guideline violation.
    • Mark as spam: Marks the reply as spam for review.
    • Trash: Moves the reply to Trash.

 

    19 replies

    jvdc
    Expert ⭐️
    July 29, 2026

    @mdfahd ​@Sudhanshu 

    Great update, thank you. I have turned this on in our community and I have now 2 comments :-)

    • I find that the grey background for the body of the reply looks weird on short replies. Shouldn't its width always be 100% instead?
    • The translate menu has always been there but now I noticed how weird it looks and I wonder if it would be better placed at the top along the timestamp of the post (like on a topic).

     

    Sfont
    Gainsight Employee ⭐️
    Gainsight Employee ⭐️
    July 29, 2026

    Thanks for the feedback, ​@jvdc !

    On the grey background width for replies, we actually explored both approaches during the design phase and did some benchmarking analysis, and based on those insights we felt this solution gave the best balance. That said, we'll keep an eye on it, if this becomes recurring feedback from other customers, we'll revisit the design and see whether an adjustment makes sense.

    As for the translate menu placement, we've already discussed this internally and are exploring better ways to optimize that experience. You should see an update in one of the upcoming releases.

    DCH Design Team
    jvdc
    Expert ⭐️
    July 29, 2026

    Cool thanks!

    One more :)

    When there are no threaded replies we just see a “0” without the word “replies”. 

    I think we should either put the word or completely hide the 0, no? 

    bjoern_schulze
    Helper ⭐️⭐️⭐️
    July 30, 2026

    edit: The bug regarding the “0” is already known. Disregard my comment. :)

    samanthahamlet
    Gainsight Community Manager
    July 30, 2026

    Hey 👋
    Thanks for flagging, a fix is on the way for this! 

    bjoern_schulze
    Helper ⭐️⭐️⭐️
    July 30, 2026

    Small bug: When the editor window opens, there’s a dimension info showing for about half a second in the top right corner of the editor before it disappears.

     

    Sudhanshu
    Gainsight Product Manager
    July 30, 2026

    Hi ​@bjoern_schulze! Thanks for reporting this. I couldn’t replicate this, someone from my team will look into your instance just to validate. Just to confirm, is this on your sandbox or production?

    bjoern_schulze
    Helper ⭐️⭐️⭐️
    July 30, 2026

    @Sudhanshu Interesting, now it doesn’t happen anymore. I could replicate it on here too a few hours ago.

    bjoern_schulze
    Helper ⭐️⭐️⭐️
    July 30, 2026

    Question: How can we access the phrases of the actions within the dropdown action menu?

     

    Sudhanshu
    Gainsight Product Manager
    July 30, 2026

    Hi Bjoern! These are not phrases since its only admin facing. Just curious as to what would you like to customize here and is it for internal terminology?

    bjoern_schulze
    Helper ⭐️⭐️⭐️
    July 30, 2026

    We have a german speaking community so thoses “phrases” seem to have been translated automatically. For one those translations aren’t perfect, and also they sometimes differ from the current ones we use in the “old” reply functionality, which the moderators are being used to.

    Also, on our community we enable superusers to do moderation actions, so I’d like to have correct phrases for them to use as well.

     

    BradleyOVO
    Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️
    July 30, 2026

    Very excited with this update! Been waiting a while for this one. 

    Just a quick question, when enabling this feature for the first time, does this take effect only from any new post and reply, or make any changes to historical content and threads? 

    And will a user be able to user the threaded replies feature on old content against any old replies in the older format? 

    Hope that makes sense,

    ^Bradley

    I'm not lazy, I'm just in energy saving mode!
    Sudhanshu
    Gainsight Product Manager
    July 30, 2026

    Hi ​@BradleyOVO! Thanks for the question. 

    The experience applies to all topics from the moment you toggle it on. The replies will remain flat until a new child reply is posted. New interface is applied to all topics as well.

    One thing to note: if you toggle the feature on and toggle it off after some time, any child replies that might have been posted in that window will be hidden. They will still be there but only appear when the Threaded replies toggle is on.

    Hope this answers your question. Please feel free to ask any follow-ups.

    BradleyOVO
    Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️
    July 30, 2026

    Thank you ​@Sudhanshu 

    We’re excited to now have this live on our own platform - even shouted out about it to the wider community: 

    https://forum.ovoenergy.com/general-153/new-feature-introducing-threaded-replies-21281

    I do have one moderation question - If someone replies normally instead of directly to another users comment, I can’t currently see any way to moderate this where we can move it into a threaded reply chain?

    Currently you can only move a comment to a new topic thread or create a brand new topic altogether. 


    Will this be a function we can expect to see shortly? Just thinking of ways we can keep comment threads neat, tidy and easier for our community to navigate the comments they want to see.

    I'm not lazy, I'm just in energy saving mode!
    bjoern_schulze
    Helper ⭐️⭐️⭐️
    July 30, 2026

    Nice to have: Move a reply up or down a level, i.e. if a user clearly responded to another comment, I’d like to have to possibility to move the comment below the “parent” comment manually.

    Contributor ⭐️
    July 30, 2026

    Hey everyone,

     

    We’ve recently enabled threaded replies on our community platform and have noticed that the edit function on our end is very small. This makes it difficult to work on articles, as we cannot resize the window. Do you have any suggestions to improve this issue? Here’s a screenshot for context.

     

     

    BradleyOVO
    Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️
    July 31, 2026

    Yes if we could get this to be expanded like it used to be, it would make our moderating lives so much easier. 

    I'm not lazy, I'm just in energy saving mode!
    BradleyOVO
    Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️
    July 31, 2026

    Some feedback from a super user from our community in relation to how threaded replies now work when navigating to the latest reply of a given topic:
     


    Any known issues with topic card links? Or something that may need addressing?

    Also, we’ve had supers also discussing whether users will have the ability to turn their view from normal replies & nested replies depending on their preference? This is something offered in other platform communities:

     

     

    I'm not lazy, I'm just in energy saving mode!