The "disclosure widgets" are the little arrows () that you use to expand and collapse posts (except in threads, where the individual posts are always expanded). If you don't prefer navigating this way, you can hide these by going to and unchecking the show disclosure widgets box. Then, you'll navigate QDL the same way you would any other website, by simply clicking the hyperlinks to see those posts, instead of expanding them in place.

 

The expanded/collapsed state of the disclosure widgets is user-specific, not window-specific. So if you have QDL running in more than one browser tab, expanding and collapsing posts in one will affect the visibilities in the other, if you're in the same QDL branch in both tabs.

 

Sometimes you'll want to expand or collapse all of the sub-posts within a particular branch. To do this, use the Expand All or Collapse All option in the default navbar. These options are not enabled at the QDL root, since it would take forever to expand or collapse every item in the hierarchy. But if you descend into a particular branch, you can click these items. The first thing that they do is calculate how many posts will be affected by the action. Expanding or collapsing more than 1000 posts at a time is not allowed, as the operation would time-out long before 1000 posts could be sent over the wire. Anything over 100 posts is probably a bad idea. You can set the depth of the recursion to reduce the number of posts that will be affected. In the event that the operation times out before completing, everything will get collapsed. Then you can more selectively open stuff back up again.