Disallow threaded replies and Expand Threads

[CindyCFFP]

The new option to "Disallow Threaded Replies" is checked in some of our classes, causing me to have to look through many discussions to disable it. Is there a way to globally uncheck that option so that we have have threaded discussion? In addition, it seems that users now need to "Expand Threads," instead of having "Collapse Threads" be the default. Could I also globally set that for my institution?

[Michael_17 · Accepted solution]

Hello @CindyCFFP, 

While this may not answer your questions as to whether Disallow Threaded Replies can be unchecked globally, the following blog post and attached Public Incident Report should explain why this was enabled: Disallow Threaded Replies option in Discussions 

Many institutions were negatively impacted by the change to threaded replies and have provided their feedback on how this change was implemented. My institution opened a ticket requesting assistance with disabling the Disallow Threaded Replies in our discussions as we intended for 99% of our discussions to allow users to reply to one another. Canvas Support responded stating that the setting being enabled after the update was intended and they were unable to assist as it aligned with the behavior they described in the blog post above. 

My team and I ended up using Canvas Data 2 to look up what Discussions had a discussion_type of 'side_comment' and work with our LMS Admin to use the API to update them to 'threaded'. 

[IanGoh]

While I can see the discussion_type in our CD2 data, is there a way to tell how that option 'disallow threaded replies' is set? Or is there a direct correlation between the checkbox and the discussion_type?

[Michael_17]

Hello @IanGoh, 

The checkbox is a direct correlation to the discussion_type. I checked with our LMS Admin and they provided the following summary: 

• Checkbox enabled == "discussion_type": "not_threaded" OR "discussion_type": "side_comment"
• Checkbox disabled == "discussion_type": "threaded" 

[IanGoh]

One other caveat for folk who head down the path of using the API to modify discussion_type; you cannot modify locked discussion topics (in the CD2 table, it'd be discussion_topics.locked  = 1)

[IanGoh]

And we seem to have some in CD2 that have discussion_type: __dap_unspecified__

we may have to flip those to threaded as well... we're checking further