Here's an apology that I'm sure I can shove straight up my ass, fuckmeverymuch.
Back on topic, what I should have said was something more like...
You know, while we're at it, can people try to title their threads in a way that makes what it's about more obvious to people who weren't on the OP's train of thought when they posted it? And while we're at that, can we try to make them make sense as a title? I don't understand how some of the titles get assembled from words relating to the topic without the title even being a coherent statement.Further back on topic, thanks 'cuda for letting us know you've been merging threads that often. I was starting to wonder with the wiki threads. I can see having separate threads about characters (Assange himself) and associations (Manning-Lamo or MacKinnon-UK-US.mil) as they relate secondarily to WikiLeaks, but I doubt we need a new thread for every news release directly relating to a part of a leak event (e.g., cablegate).
I know we see this happen with every big topic that comes through, and obviously requesting behavioral changes amounts to pissing in the wind (or in my case, pissing on an electric fence while standing in a mud puddle), but for all the good ideas everyone has shared in this thread for functional, technical changes to the way the board software works, I hope you all realize you're still just spraying the flowers. Jeff's not a programmer, and even if he were, it's a bad idea to heavily customize any web content management system, including forum software such as this, since it seriously hampers the ability to upgrade to new security releases, for instance.
I realize I've mentioned this before, but most of the feature ideas you are describing are encompassed by collaborative journalism platforms such as
Scoop. There's an editorial queue for users to vote stories up to the front page (or into a topic section), there's individual blogs ("diaries") which you can opt to follow in the sidebar so you see new posts by anybody you like, and there's options for the story comments including nesting, threading, and dynamic expand/collapse.
This of course would mean yet another move, and I don't think the content can be easily migrated, so I'd see a migration process that looks like starting new stories on the new platform and posting a link to any relevant threads here before locking the threads.
To me it sounds like a huge PITA. Is Jeff up for this?
Also Montag, I'm glad you brought up the issue of the psychological barrier of entering a long thread you weren't a part of, but I can tell you they're typically worth the read-through and you never know when you'll have something valuable to add, or at least clarify for others with a question. It also creates more work for mods when we start threads because we never knew Big Thread With Elusive Title was about the same thing because we'd never read it to find out.
Montag wrote:Once [Quaid's] psychosis and breakdown become a distant memory, why bring it back from the dead?
For context?
Also, I love everybody here. Thanks for participating the best way you know how, because participation here is always more important than making things convenient for the rest of us (or for the mods).