Limiting indentations for threaded comments in Drupal

(This works for Drupal 5.x, 6.x, 7.x.)

Threaded comments in Drupal are fine, but after a certain number of replies, you really need to limit the amount of indentation or the comment space will get too small to be useful.

At first, I hacked the comment module and added a variable to define the maximum number of nested comments. Since I am drastically reducing the number of hacks in favor of more appropriate solutions, I decided to solve this with CSS.

Take a look at the result. In comments, the left indentation (margin-left) is taken from comment.css.

By default, comment.css defines the left margin for each indentation:

/* Default from comment.css */
.indented {
  margin-left: 25px;
}

To limit the maximum number of indentations, I added the following to the theme style sheet:

/* Limit max nbr of indentations */
.indented .indented .indented .indented .indented .indented {
  margin-left: 0;
}

The maximum level of nested comments in this example is 6, with 5 indentations, so the class is repeated that many times. This works regardless of the actual number of nested comments. Perhaps not the most elegant solution, but it is easy to implement.