RogueAgent
21st August 2003, 01:52 PM
I was thinking this morning about how sometimes forum topics mutate into people talking about vastly differrent things to what the original topic was about.
I realised that many people in the past get annoyed by this, being interested in the original topic and seeing multiple replies they keep checking to see that the new posts are completely unrelated. This frustration has led to more than one person I know of giving up on the forum as threads they have started mutate and are taken over by new discussions. People dont like to post a reply to something said 20 posts earlier in a thread so often the original discussion dies off as the new topic takes over.
Then I had an epiphany.
Probably not the newest idea, but I have decided on a policy of topic 'splitting'. In other words, then a thread starts to mutate, I am going to create a new thread and split the posts between the new and old thread in the hope of encouraging the new topic, but also preserving the conversation in the old.
I really should write some scripts to do this, but for now I will do it manually.
So, in summary, if you find yourself suddenly as the author of a new thread, dont be alarmed. If you wonder what happenned to your posts in a thread, take a look around the forum and see if they might have been moved to a thread more suitable.
Hopefully we can encourage more meaningful discussion and keep the banter from taking over everything.
I realised that many people in the past get annoyed by this, being interested in the original topic and seeing multiple replies they keep checking to see that the new posts are completely unrelated. This frustration has led to more than one person I know of giving up on the forum as threads they have started mutate and are taken over by new discussions. People dont like to post a reply to something said 20 posts earlier in a thread so often the original discussion dies off as the new topic takes over.
Then I had an epiphany.
Probably not the newest idea, but I have decided on a policy of topic 'splitting'. In other words, then a thread starts to mutate, I am going to create a new thread and split the posts between the new and old thread in the hope of encouraging the new topic, but also preserving the conversation in the old.
I really should write some scripts to do this, but for now I will do it manually.
So, in summary, if you find yourself suddenly as the author of a new thread, dont be alarmed. If you wonder what happenned to your posts in a thread, take a look around the forum and see if they might have been moved to a thread more suitable.
Hopefully we can encourage more meaningful discussion and keep the banter from taking over everything.