Limit results in nested comment system

I've created a nested comment system that outputs comments in the following layout:

| Comment 1
| | Comment 2
| | | Comment 3
| | | | Comment 4
| | Comment 5
| Comment 6
| Comment 7

This works fine for a smaller number of comments, but it becomes a problem when there are hundreds or thousands.

One problem, for example, is that the depth of the comments gets too large, like this:

| Comment 1
| | Comment 2
| | | Comment 3
| | | | Comment 4
| | | | | Comment 5
| | | | | | Comment 6
| | | | | | | Comment 7
| | | | | | | | Comment 8
| | | | | | | | | Comment 9
| | | | | | | | | | Comment 10
| | Comment 11
| Comment 12
| Comment 13

This becomes an issue when displaying the comments to the user as it makes the page/comments harder to read.

What I want to do is limit the number of results at certain depths. For example, in the code snippet above, how would I make it show no more than 5 comments deep and then have a button that says "click for more comments" that reveals the rest of the comments?

Additionally, another problem is showing too many nested comments, like this:

| Comment 1 (top-level comment)
| | Comment 2
| | Comment 3
| | Comment 4
| | Comment 5
| | Comment 6
| | Comment 7
| | Comment 8
| | Comment 9
| | Comment 10
| Comment 11 (top-level comment)
| Comment 12 (top-level comment)

Obviously, for readability reasons, I don't want to show all of the nested comments for each top-level comment. So how could I limit the number of results shown to 5 as well?

I need to combine these two ideas to give me a reasonable way to query the database to form a comment tree.

Here is my current code. I have a Comment.php model with the following relationship:

public function children()
{
    return $this->hasMany('App\Comment', 'parent_id', 'id')->with('children');
}

parent_id is the id of the parent comment.

And to get a comment tree of all comments currently in the database, I do:

$comments = Comment::where('post_id', 1)
    ->where('parent_id', 0)
    ->with('children')
    ->get();

How can I change my code/query to get my desired output?

via Chebli Mohamed